France’s Socialist government is to make another climbdown in the face of right-wing family-values campaigners with the scrapping of a gender-equality programme in the country’s schools, French media report, reports RFI.
Education Minister Benoît Hamon will announce on Monday the end of the ABCD of Equality, a programme to combat inequality between girls and boys that was supposed to be extended to all France’s schools between 2013 and 2018, Le Monde reported on Saturday.
The programme has been tried out in 275 of France’s 48,000 schools since last autumn and, according to Le Monde, 75 per cent of teachers involved wanted to continue with it.
But far-right agitators, fired up by last year’s massive demonstrations against gay marriage, claimed that it was smuggling “gender theory” that supposedly claims that differences between the sexes are socially acquired into the syllabus.
They organised a boycott of schools over the question in January.
“I want to calms things down,” Hamon told France Culture radio on Wednesday, claiming that the debate had fixated on the “container rather than the content”.
Read more of this report from RFI.
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