[lg policy] France Battles Over Its Identity at School

Wed Sep 28 20:32:44 UTC 2016

Joan of Arc’s Shaky Pedestal: France Battles Over Its Identity at School
Photo
An elementary classroom in Paris. Credit Fred Dufour/Agence France-Presse —
Getty Images

PARIS — Bikini — and burkini — season is over here, but with the new school
year, France’s battle over national identity has erupted on a new front:
its history curriculum.

School curriculums have long been a part of culture wars, including in the
United States, where there have been tussles over slavery and evolution.
But in France, where the state sets school programs nationwide, the
country’s understanding of its past — and how it uses education to shape
young citizens
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/11/world/europe/charlie-hebdo-attack-puts-schools-under-scrutiny.html>
— has become a hot-button issue in a fraught election season
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/05/world/europe/france-nicolas-sarkozy-presidential-election.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0>
.

Changes to how Joan of Arc and other touchstone historical figures are
taught in elementary school, as well as changes to how French, Latin and
Greek are introduced, have sparked fierce arguments between right-leaning
politicians and intellectuals, who believe schools should foster national
pride, and the Socialist education minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem and her
defenders, who argue that the curriculum should reflect changes in society.

In a recent campaign speech and newspaper column
<http://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/societe/2016/08/31/31003-20160831ARTFIG00269-francois-fillon-enseigner-le-recit-national-a-nos-enfants.php?redirect_premium>,
a former prime minister running in primaries for the right-wing Republican
party, François Fillon, said France “shouldn’t have to apologize” for its
history. And last week, former president Nicolas Sarkozy, also a candidate
in the right-wing party primaries, upped the ante. “Once you become French,
your ancestors are the Gauls,” he said, adding that students should be
taught, “‘I love France, I learned the history of France, I see myself as
French.’”

This increasing politicization of education is happening at a time of
intense debate over immigration, multiculturalism and national identity,
said Rachel D. Hutchins, a professor at the University of Lorraine in
France and the author
<https://www.routledge.com/Nationalism-and-History-Education-Curricula-and-Textbooks-in-the-United/Hutchins/p/book/9781138801578>
of “Nationalism and History Education: Curricula and Textbooks in the
United States and France.”

“For politicians, targeting history education provides a simple,
rhetorically powerful response to public fears over immigration,” she said.

Mr. Fillon, who was prime minister from 2007 until 2012 under Mr. Sarkozy,
said that if elected, he would insist the Education Ministry mandate a
“national narrative.” His remarks were seen as a rebuke to decades of
changes to textbooks that have come to cast France’s colonial exploits,
particularly in North Africa, in a negative light.

“Our history has glorious moments and tragic moments, but it’s an
entirety,” he said. “We should embrace it and we do not have to apologize
for it.” He also lamented the removal this fall from the elementary school
curriculum of Julius Caesar, Cardinal Richelieu and Voltaire.

This year’s elementary school curriculum
<http://www.education.gouv.fr/pid285/bulletin_officiel.html?cid_bo=94708>
was changed significantly — to focus more on French history and less on
world history — after “a very intense debate,” said Michel Lussault,
president of the Superior Council for Programs, the state-appointed
independent committee of 18 experts that sets curriculums.

The debate centered on how best to teach history and the French language,
and how to divide the elementary school curriculum into three-year cycles.
But at a time when terrorist attacks have pushed questions of national
identity and civic education to the fore, it quickly became politically
charged. In the end, the committee’s decision to focus on French history
was a compromise between traditionalists who wanted more of a “national
narrative” and progressives who believed the curriculum should resonate
more with today’s students and make them more active participants in the
classroom.

Mr. Lussault, a geography professor at the University of Lyon, said that
Mr. Fillon was playing politics. “This is a kind of political rhetoric that
doesn’t have much to do with the reality of the curriculum,” he said.

Even if the new curriculum eliminated detailed lists of historical figures,
including Joan of Arc and Caesar, teachers are still required to cover
their epochs. “I imagine if you’re teaching the Roman conquest of Gaul, you
would talk about Julius Caesar,” Mr. Lussault said.

After last year’s terrorist attacks in Paris
<http://www.nytimes.com/news-event/attacks-in-paris?inline=nyt-classifier>,
the Education Ministry added more hours dedicated to teaching about
secularism and the republican values of liberty, equality and fraternity.

Those changes came amid a debate over what it means to be French. “So many
people have a French identity card, but the question of what is France and
how to transmit the knowledge or the love of France, that’s what the
attacks introduced into the debate,” said Alain Finkielkraut
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/12/world/europe/once-hopeful-for-harmony-a-philosopher-voices-discord-in-france.html>,
a public intellectual whose 2013 book, “The Unhappy Identity,” about the
strains of a multicultural society, lamented what he sees as a decline in
school standards.

Ever since the French Revolution — and certainly since the French state
wrested control of schools from the Roman Catholic Church in the early 20th
century — education has been the government’s main method of instilling
certain values of citizenship. But what kind of citizens?

“Should history be civic history? Or a way of teaching curiosity and
otherness? That’s a big issue,” said Patricia Legris, a professor of
contemporary history at the University of Rennes. As for the kind of
citizen: “Should it be a national citizen? Or a European citizen? A world
citizen?”

In “The Phantom School,” published this month, the right-wing intellectual
Robert Redeker argues
<http://www.lefigaro.fr/vox/societe/2016/08/26/31003-20160826ARTFIG00065-robert-redeker-l-ecole-s-applique-a-effacer-la-civilisation-francaise.php>
that French youth are out of sync with French values because schools have
gone downhill. “Many are of North African origin and they are in
dissonance, they are like a separate people,” said Mr. Redeker, who has
lived under police protection since 2006, when he wrote an opinion piece in
Le Figaro calling Islam a violent religion.

“They have a hatred of the country into which they were born,” Mr. Redeker
continued. “But rather than teaching love and respect for this country and
its language and its history, the school since the start of the ’90s has
taught them that ultimately we are mean, slave owners, colonialists, almost
murderers.”

Mr. Redeker and others who emphasize Europe’s Greco-Roman past are upset
that this year Latin and Greek, which are electives, were changed to focus
more on ancient civilizations and less on grammar. “It’s pedagogical
tourism,” he said. “Latin and Greek, like mathematics, are a school of
logic, one that teaches rigor in thinking.”

Whether curriculums can help solve France’s woes is another question. “A
kind of magical thinking goes on around them,” said Mark Lilla, a professor
of humanities at Columbia who has written extensively
<http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/mark-lilla/> on contemporary French
politics. “The presumption is that if we add 15 more minutes of this or
that, we’ve done something to fight the man or to fight the barbarians that
are at the gate.”

“In a sense it’s testimony to their faith in the life of the mind,”
Professor Lilla added, “but it’s also a way of avoiding hard political
choices.”

NYTimes Sept. 28, 2016

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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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