France’s Sarkozy, ratings tanking, proposes controversial education plan

France’s conservative president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has an idea.

Most of his countrymen think it stinks.

A little over a week ago, in a speech delivered to a dinner gathering, in Paris, of members of France’s Jewish community, Sarkozy proposed revising the nationwide school curriculum, which is set and overseen by a national education ministry. Starting in the fall, the president says, he wants to see a new component in the history curriculum of France’s equivalent of fifth-graders, in which each child would be required to learn the life story of one of the approximately 11,000 French children who perished during the Nazis’ murderous campaign against the Jews during World War II.

Régis Duvignau/Reuters

French President Nicolas Sarkozy (center) and Education Minister Xavier Darcos (right) speak with a teacher in a public-school classroom during their recent visit to the city of Périgueux

Sarkozy said:
“Nothing is more moving, for a child, than the story of a child his own age, who has the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as he, but who, in the dawn of the 1940s, had the bad fortune to be defined as a Jew.” (New York Times) A few days later, during a visit to Périgueux, in central France, Sarkozy addressed an audience of educators and citizens, again putting forth his history-study proposal for elementary-school pupils. At that time, with Education Minister Xavier Darcos in tow (it will be his job to figure out how to implement the proposed curriculum change), Sarkozy stated that, “fundamentally,” his idea to match each fifth-grader with a murdered, wartime Jewish child whose story he or she would have to get to know personally “is about giving all the children of France [their] first benchmarks, which sometimes they so cruelly lack. Intellectual, cultural and moral benchmarks – these three dimensions are inseparable; they are integral parts of the idea, which is fundamentally so French, of [a] national education.” (French Ministry of Education; emphasis in original text; complete text of Sarkozy’s Périgueux speech here, in French, in PDf form.)

Sarkozy’s proposal immediately provoked the consternation of his countrymen across the political – and the religious – spectrum, for in putting it forth, the president (who has publicly described himself as a Roman Catholic and whose ancestry is partly Jewish) was seen as crossing an absolutely holy line in French political life: that is the strict divide between religion and politics in what is one of Europe’s – and the world’s – most proudly secular states. His proposal prompted some critics to note that, if French schools will be required to focus in this manner on wartime injustices against the Jews, in fairness, shouldn’t they also be required to give equal time to other groups who have been abused in the past? (Like, for example, during France’s long past as a colonial ruler? Many French public-school educators probably do not want to have to go there.)

Charles Platiau/Reuters

A visitor examines photographs of Jews who were deported from wartime France at the Memorial to the Shoah, a museum in Paris

Even the veteran politician and activist Simone Veil, a former president of the European Parliament and herself a survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, who attended the recent Paris dinner event, said in reaction to Sarkozy’s proposal that, as soon as she heard him announce it, “My blood turned to ice.” Veil, the honorary president of the Paris-based Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, said she found Sarkozy’s proposed history-teaching plan to be “unimaginable, unsupportable, dramatic and, above all, unjust….You can’t inflict that on little, ten-year-old children. You can’t ask a child to identify with a dead child. That [kind of] memory is to heavy to bear.” (L’Express; cited also in Le Monde)

However, after her well-publicized, negative reaction to Sarkozy’s proposal, it has since been reported that Veil has agreed to take part in an advisory team the education minister is assembling; its task will be to figure out how to implement the president’s suggested study plan. (Ouest-France)

Since Sarkozy announced his plan, opinion-survey data in France have shown that 85 percent of respondents decidedly reject it. (Le Journal du Dimanche) “Even in his own [political] camp,” Le Figaro notes, 71 percent of his conservative party’s supporters dismiss it, and 82 percent of parents affiliated with his party say they disapprove of the idea. Thus, the president’s office has revised its proposal; now, its spokesmen say, each fifth-grade class, instead of each individual, fifth-grade pupil, would be assigned its own murdered Jewish child to get to know personally by examining his or her life story.

Web site of Embassy of France in Spain

The respected, well-known French politician and activist Simone Veil, seen here in a file photo, will contribute to the work of a committee that will try to figure out how to implement Sarkozy’s education proposal

Le Point reports that some psychiatrists have jumped into the discussion of Sarkozy’s proposed curriculum change, offering their thoughts about whether or not fifth-graders would be able to handle the grim details and emotional impact of the study of children’s deaths at the hands of Nazi killers. In the same magazine, the French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy, who regularly opines on, well, just about everything, weighs in on Sarkozy’s proposal, arguing that its intention may be positive but that its implementation poses many challenges and must be carefully thought out by experienced, respected educators, policy-makers and Jewish leaders like – well, like Simone Veil. It’s not enough for sentiment and politics to be mixed up in an unfocused way in the classroom, “BHL,” as he is known in France, suggests. It’s not enough for fifth-graders to be made to learn thousands of dead children’s “names without their context[s], all these little faces floating in the ether of ignorance” that isn’t backed up by solid, historical details.

However, notes a Le Point reader of Algerian background, in response to Lévy’s commentary: “Mr. BHL,…my wife and I, we have taught [our fifth-grade child] a lot about his parents’ homeland…, about the war there [for independence from France], but we have always avoided the recollections of horror, of the massacres and the torturing [of Algerians]….Educate your children as you wish to, [but] leave our children in peace.”

Posted By: Edward M. Gomez (Email) |
February 25 2008 at 07:24 AM