The shootings and bombings in Paris on the evening of Friday November 13th targeted people – mainly young people – who had simply gone out to enjoy themselves. Two days after the killings Mediapart talked to pupils and students from the Paris region as they went back to school or university. Many spoke of their fear of being “in the wrong place at the wrong time” and are still struggling to make sense of the carnage. But they insist they are determined to carry on living their lives to the full. Mathilde Goanec, Dan Israel, Amélie Poinssot and Ellen Salvi report.
The long summer holidays are over and on Tuesday this week French pupils went back to school. There are none of the major reforms and controversies that have greeted previous new academic years under President François Hollande. But there are still some changes for schoolchildren and teachers alike, notably new compulsory moral and civics lessons prompted by the terror attacks in Paris in January. Feriel Alouti and Lucie Delaporte report.
In its response to the terror attacks in Paris in January the French government emphasised the importance of schools and the central role of secularism in fighting intolerance and extremism. Mediapart recently visited schools in the north of the French city of Amiens, an area which has recently seen riots and where the Moroccan-born education minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem herself grew up and was educated. Here the issue of secularism divides teachers, parents and local help groups alike. “I have the impression that, faced with this debate, everyone is a bit lost,” says one teacher. Mediapart's education correspondent Lucie Delaporte reports from the city.
The French education ministry on Friday published its latest detailed evaluation of school performance and the prospects of pupils leaving the academic system. Much of it is alarming reading; every year, about 140,000 young people leave the French educational system without any qualifications and there are now 900,000 people aged between 15 and 29 who are neither in education, nor training, nor actively seeking employment. The report concludes that French pupils from lower social categories are at a greater academic disadvantage than those in other similar European countries. Lucie Delaporte reports.
Last week parents of pupils at around 100 French primary schools kept their children at home following unfounded rumours that they were being taught 'gender theory'. Education minister Vincent Peillon felt obliged to order parents to be summonsed to schools to explain that the claims being spread in a concerted text and email campaign were untrue. The woman behind the school boycott call – which exploits a favourite issue of the far-right and hard-line Catholics - is 55-year-old teacher Farida Belghoul. Yet Belghoul was not always involved with the far-right; in the early 1980s she was a high-profile left-wing campaigner on immigrant rights. Lucie Delaporte and Rachida El Azzouzi report on her political journey.
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