The French Senate just made public the findings of a parliamentary inquiry launched in the wake of the murder of Professor Samuel Paty by an Islamist terrorist. The findings on the state of French schools are alarming and show that the situation has been steadily worsening for several years. The senators have put forward a number of recommendations in an attempt to curb the phenomenon.
After the murder of history teacher Samuel Paty, who was beheaded by an Islamic terrorist of Chechen origin in October 2020, the committee of inquiry was set up at the request of the teacher’s sister, who felt at the time that nothing had been done by the education system to prevent her brother’s murder. The teacher had been the subject of repeated pressure and threats that had been brought to the attention of the Education Ministry hierarchy, to no avail.
Two senators, one from the ranks of Les Républicains and the other from the Centrist Union, presented their conclusions at a lengthy hearing in the Senate on Wednesday, March 6th. They denounce the seemingly inexorable rise in violence—a well-known phenomenon—but above all, the blindness of the institution. The national education department’s figures are clearly completely out of step with the reality on the ground, and the administration systematically chooses a bias aimed at minimising them. Laurent Lafon, one of the two rapporteurs, gives this example:
The figures from the Ministry of Education tell us that 0.2% of teachers in lower and upper secondary schools say they have been threatened with a weapon during the school year. That may seem very low, but it’s almost 900 teachers. That’s 4 a day.
The rapporteurs describe the deterioration in the daily lives of teachers, who are regularly threatened and verbally and physically attacked by parents. Teachers are not the only ones affected: educational staff such as head teachers and educational advisers are also victims.
Faced with an increase in violence, teachers often adopt a strategy of self-censorship. In sensitive subjects, such as natural sciences or history, they don’t broach the subjects that cause trouble so as not to be reprimanded or challenged by students or parents on the content they teach.
The trivialisation of radical Islam is the phenomenon that most worries the authors of the Senate report. They note that the expression “faire une Paty,” in reference to the beheading of the history teacher, has passed into the everyday language of teachers who live with this threat uttered by some pupils on a daily basis. “I saw a teacher at the end of his day, (who was delighted to) ‘not have suffered a Paty’ today,” explained the LR senator. “This is the situation as it exists. The rise in demands for identity and community, and the manifestation of radical Islam and certain new forms of spirituality must not be ignored.”
In view of the scale of the phenomenon, the rapporteurs regard the responses provided by schools as highly inadequate and put forward 38 recommendations to change the situation. They deem the teaching of secularism in its current form, confined to a few limited hours of the moral and civic education curriculum, ineffective and recommend it be extended. They also call for a complete overhaul of the system of sanctions, with harmonisation at the national level:
Sanctions and the disciplinary corpus must be reviewed, by simplifying procedures, streamlining appeals, and reviewing the composition of disciplinary councils.
Finally, the report points to a phenomenon that is well-known to French teachers, and which has already given rise to waves of mobilisation by teachers on social networks in the past: the ‘no waves’ hashtag (#pasdevagues). This hashtag has been used in several viral campaigns on Twitter in previous years to denounce the lack of reaction from the school hierarchy to the harassment and violence that teachers have to endure—a lack of reaction that can sometimes even amount to pressure on teachers to keep quiet, with tendentious motives such as “avoiding playing into the hands of the Rassemblement National.”
One of the latest manifestations of this ‘no waves’ state of mind is the release of a film precisely entitled Pas de vagues (No Waves) on 18 January 2024, largely financed by public funds, which tells the story of a teacher in a homosexual relationship with a man of North African origin who is subjected to homophobic mockery by one of his pupils, a white girl. The scenario, which is totally improbable and surreal and light years away from what the teachers are experiencing in their secondary schools, is emblematic of the blindness of the French Education Ministry, which believes that by supporting such productions it is doing an educational and civic-minded job—by inventing problems and portraying situations that simply do not exist.
The content of the Senate report published on March 6th is not fundamentally new, and the document follows a whole series of documents that have sounded the alarm, in vain, about the ravages of radical Islam in French schools. What is perhaps new is the emphasis it places on the “solitude of the teacher,” who is confronted every day with increasingly difficult teaching conditions and a lack of support from anyone from the professional hierarchy to deal with increasingly complex and dangerous crises.
