WORLD WORLDWIDE FRANCE News Journal Update - (en) France, OCL CA #334 - Back to school, a matter of school clothes? (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

To get away from reality, how did your return to school go? Can you
describe the situation (professional, salary, material) of a contract
teacher in the Paris suburbs like you? ---- I think I have made the best
false start in the history of national education. Two weeks after the
start of the school year, the rectorate indirectly informed me of my
appointment in two establishments: a high school and a college.
Indirectly, because the email was addressed to the management of the
establishments in question: I was only copied. In short, after an hour
of lessons with a second year class rather happy to have a teacher, the
management told me that the teacher was back and that I therefore had to
inform the students, with whom I was beginning to establish
relationships. bonds of trust. I had never experienced such a
humiliating situation, it goes without saying.

But since we have to explain the working conditions, we might as well
tell things as they are. Being assigned to two establishments, in
mid-September, means in concrete terms having an unfavorable timetable
for both the teacher and the students, by being moved to several rooms
(which has the gift of disturbing children used to a fixed room for a
middle school teacher), learning the relevant levels at the last minute
without any real preparation time (at that precise moment, I had five, a
record), sometimes spending more time on public transport than 'to do
class. However, I was very well received by my tenured colleagues and
the administrative team.
As for my material situation, this is again a reality shared by many
contract workers. I signed a new one-year fixed-term contract and my
salary is around 2,000 euros per month.

 From a more general point of view, like every year, the start of the
school year is the time for lots of announcements from the ruling class
and debates in the media about the school which give the impression of
media jamming. In fact, for you, what is the general state of the
"Public Education Service" at the start of the 2023 school year,
compared to ministerial declarations?

There is obviously a shocking gap between government announcements and
what is experienced on the ground, particularly in establishments
classified as priority education networks (REP) but also in all those,
and there are many, which have not not this recognition while having
similar difficulties. This is for example my case this year. This is
part of the denial of the political class and institutional violence
against the primary users of this public service that is National
Education, namely children whose well-being should be guaranteed.

In many establishments, and according to union sources, several weeks
after the start of the school year, there was not a teacher in front of
each class, contrary to ministerial declarations. I learned that, in my
establishment, a colleague had managed to transfer to a more favorable
territory and that another had ended up resigning. These are two
positions that will have to be replaced, most likely by precarious
workers like me, without real training, and placed in unmotivating, if
not exhausting, conditions.
The state of this public service is comparable to that of health,
transport, information, culture... It is that of inexorable degradation
which accompanies a logic of privatization and exclusion of classes
popular. There is social violence on all levels.

The "controversy" over the abaya was, however, the main subject of the
start of the school year. This seems to be a continuation of what you
describe in your book The Muslim Factory (Libertalia, 2017): the
propagation by elites of an identity fever, the construction of a kind
of clothing delinquency which endangers the Republic...

Many of us saw it as a new artificial and sterile controversy which
served as a diversion for the government from the impossibility of
keeping its commitments. I discussed it with colleagues, parents,
journalists, activists, and all, without exception, regardless of their
sensitivity, found that power went too far for so little in this
umpteenth avatar of the culture wars. French-style. There was even
something ridiculous about the process, as if it were worn out or out of
step with the issues.
Except for a few obsessed with the "green peril" who use the slightest
event or news story to highlight it and validate their paranoid and
racist theses. We must understand that the Muslim question constitutes
one of the privileged receptacles of French passions (but we should
undoubtedly talk about French delusions), with the relationship to the
Algerian question in the background. One does not go without the other.
This is what I tried to explain in my book Algerian History of France ,
published in 2022 by PUF.
Identity fever serves to blur conflicts between classes by moving into
the terrain of values, rather than that of interests, by deepening the
crisis of a left that is too confused, too weak or too tactician to
offer a coherent response.

In this same book, you also question the role of the "left of the left"
in the fixation on religion and "race" (we could add gender here) of the
descendants of North African immigration, seen as victims, without
criticism of "the religion of the oppressed". For the abaya, we seem to
have found the same thing from a certain left which only focused on
sexism, racism or Islamophobia...

Unfortunately, and I am the first to regret it, the analyzes and
findings proposed in this book written during the summer of 2016 remain
relevant, even if certain actors have disappeared and others have
emerged in the meantime. There are strong trends in the history of the
French left's relationship to difference, particularly when it comes to
the Muslim question. Over the last century, the proponents of the theses
of orientalism (with a negative, pessimistic or even xenophobic vision)
and those of "reverse" orientalism (with a symmetrically opposed but
still essentialist vision) clashed, leaving little space for free spirits.

In our time, the same Manichean confrontation continues with some
notable developments: the collapse of the labor movement and the rise of
postmodern theories. These two phenomena are linked. A significant part
of the "left of the left" has effectively analyzed the abaya controversy
through an intersectional reading grid, making the few students who wore
it the "maximum victims" of the "Islamophobic white patriarchy"... But
the reality is a little more complex than that. It has something to do
with sexism, racism and "classism" (as they say in some circles), except
that this radical Trinity does not explain everything.

Few people, without denying these aspects, have drawn attention, at the
same time, to the purely commercial dimension of this object (typical of
"modest fashion" which generates billions) and its use for marketing
purposes. proselytizing. You just need to look at the stores (online or
not) that sell this item of clothing. Capitalism and fundamentalism
definitely go hand in hand.

In The Substitute, the diary of a (precarious) suburban teacher , you
recount your daily life as a contract worker, and in particular the
contempt on the part of tenured colleagues...

This is an element of the story that shocked some readers, even if it is
probably not the most important for me. In writing this diary, I did not
seek to denounce anything, even if friends recognized its very political
content. The initial intention was more simply to describe, as
faithfully as possible, the daily life of a worker, a commuter, a
forty-year-old... This routine includes moments of joy and others that
are more trying. If we asked a nurse, a forklift operator or journalists
to describe their professional routine, we would undoubtedly measure
what unites us all, beyond our differences: exploitation.

Depending on the environments and working conditions, this exploitation
may seem more or less unbearable. This is for example the case when
hierarchical relationships are cruelly felt, when the tyranny of small
differences (notably statutory) amplifies the division between
colleagues who do not find common ground (and the common struggle is one
of them, as conviviality and solidarity). The period described in my
diary partly explains the complicated relationships with certain
holders. Indeed, we were then subject to a strict health protocol
(preventing, for a moment, shared lunches in the teachers' room). In
addition, tensions had been created by the previous management, leaving
after their departure a deleterious climate for which I paid the price.
This does not excuse anything, but it had to be remembered. I have
experienced more pleasant atmospheres.
The fact remains that contract workers, due to their specific situation,
represent a form of anomaly for a profession based on success in
competitive examinations and the defense of status, which is obviously
preferable to precariousness.

We have the impression from reading you that there was no work
collective, no even combative union force, no strike movement in the
establishments where you worked, even though it was a year of major
social movement. . Is this the state of the resistance in the schools of
the Parisian suburbs?

Here again, I only described what I experienced and I could not invent
collective dynamics which did not exist or in which I was not able to
take part. Certainly, the year 2022 (the one described in my diary) was
a year of social mobilization but it was also an election year.
Personally, I participated in all the strike days which affected
National Education. Certain dates were particularly followed by my
colleagues.
However, as I have discovered since teaching secondary school, the
strike is not necessarily a time for discussion and organization. In
many establishments, particularly the most difficult, it is also
experienced as a recovery time for teachers, like an RTT in other
sectors. Without the existence of a dynamic collective or without the
presence of determined trade unionists, a day of strike can be followed
in a completely individualistic way.

The problem is not so much knowing whether a call is strongly followed
or not, but understanding what is actually happening in the workplace,
whether general assemblies are organized (and led by more than just
teachers) and whether initiatives are taken outside the union framework
by those primarily concerned.

On numerous occasions in your book, you compare the life and schooling
of your REP students, mainly children of proletarians with immigrant
backgrounds, to those that you yourself experienced in the North. What
has changed (or not) in thirty years?

Let's say that this return to college, made in spite of myself (because
I was destined for the University), leads me to put myself in the place
of my students (at least to try) and also to seek to understand what
could have change in the space of three decades. I share some
characteristics with my students: like them, I grew up in a
working-class environment; like them, my parents or grandparents were
born in Africa; like them, I was raised to respect the Muslim religion.
However, a generation gap separates us. I am an adult and they are
children. What we should never forget when we talk about them. Then,
they are born and built with technologies that have harmful consequences
on their attention, their understanding and their health. They also
evolve in a world (ours) where the imminence of revolution (announced in
the last century) has given way to permanent catastrophe. Some have also
seen their loved ones access higher education without benefiting from a
stable professional situation.

It seems to me that a door has closed, or maybe it was just a collective
hallucination. This is why the discourse on "republican meritocracy" can
no longer work, just like the illusion about the virtues of capitalism
or parliamentary democracy.

You observe with your middle school students that the reading grid in
which they place themselves to analyze the electoral results of
different municipalities is mainly that of a racist/anti-racist divide,
how do you interpret it?

Children take back what adults want to leave them, even if they are
smarter than that. Here again, there is a context effect. I recount the
year 2022 with the emergence of a racist candidate whose provocations
were complacently relayed by the dominant media, then echoed on the
social networks followed by my students. This obviously fueled the
identity fever, but also the anxieties and fears expressed by the
college students.
Consequently, they used a reading grid that seemed to them the most
accessible and the most relevant to understand what was happening in
their society. They tried to understand, in their own way, what called
into question the legitimacy of their presence in this country and
which, on the contrary, seemed to defend their dignity. It's simple,
undoubtedly simplistic, but essential. Obviously, I am not satisfied
with the political desertification of the ghettos where I taught. No
offense to the self-appointed spokespersons. But the alternative, if it
emerges, will not happen without these rising generations. Which does
not mean following the agenda of liberal anti-racism or diasporic
nationalism.

You bring out the ambivalence of school, in your book: both a place of
exploitation and social sorting, but also that of learning, of
transmission, of somewhat old-fashioned teachers, led by a certain
requirement, and of which you seem to be a part. What latitude remains
for an emancipatory school?

Public school, especially in current conditions, is inevitably an
ambivalent place. This is why I cannot be content with slogans about it.
Perhaps I speak as a teacher, or as the studious student I once was...
But I try to keep in mind that not all of my students have the vocation
to become teachers. Besides, few people dream of teaching. And I
understand them. This is further proof of lucidity. Can we conceive of
an emancipatory school without the emancipation of those primarily
concerned, namely the students and adults who teach the school?
Furthermore, the school is not a sanctuary isolated from the rest of
society, governed by the violence of the capitalist system. And this is
even more valid in the ghettos of the Paris suburbs or other regions of
France. This is why, it seems to me, there is nothing dishonorable for
revolutionaries to fight to limit the damage to public schools (in the
same way as other public services despite their deterioration, fatal for
some), without giving in to corporatism and reformism. We always come
back to the same problems: What society do we want? Will we still need
to transmit? Is school reducible to capitalism and the State?
Let's start from the history of revolutions and let our imagination run
wild. This is perhaps what we lack most today, with the hope of a better
world.

Three years after Samuel Paty, a teacher was shot dead by a young person
claiming to be Islamist. And once again, the "Nation" stands united
behind a mythologized school. The criticism of the capitalist school
seems quite inaudible in the reactionary and security avalanche and the
picture dripping with good feelings for the "school of the Republic"...

I learned the terrible news while I was on strike and was preparing to
join the Paris demonstration. When reality catches up with us, it is
also to remind us that the worst is always possible. Have we really seen
national unity in the face of this new crime? I'm not convinced of that.
Obviously, the political class and the teaching staff expressed their
fear. But this tragedy occurred after the rise of tensions in the Middle
East and, it seems to me, the horror "over there" left little room and
little time to grasp the horror "here". When calamities follow one
another and become so entangled, they can only lead to withdrawal into
oneself or into one's imagined community.
As for criticism of the capitalist school, it becomes completely
inaudible in such a context where fear predominates. Just as any
statement based on this or that question (local or international)
appears inadmissible when we come back to issues of life and death. One
thing is certain: there is nothing to expect from public school
gravediggers. But there is nothing to hope for from specialists in
selective indignation either. This is why we will have to hold on,
against winds and tides.

Comments collected by Sylvain

P.-S.
On school and education in Courant Alternatif
"National Education: the Pact, "I will make you an offer that you cannot
refuse"" in Courant Alternatif 333, October 2023
"National strike of the AESH: an echo from the Mantois" in Courant
Alternatif 314, November 2021 and the OCLbrochure "School, daughter and
servant of capitalism"
"Some elements on the privatization of National Education" , in Courant
Alternatif 301, June 2020
"Education: from one pope to another" , Courant Alternatif 322, summer 2022
The brochure: "The School, daughter and servant of capitalism" , 2022
and of course, still available or downloadable online the special issue
The School between domination and emancipation

http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article3975
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