The self-managed high school had existed since 1982. A project to
transform the school, with the idea of operating without hierarchy, by
developing a pedagogy that was thought of collectively. In 81, with the
arrival of the "socialists" in power, four experimental high school
projects were born. Savary, Minister of Education at the time, gave the
green light to Gabriel Cohn-bendit, Daniel's brother and many others
from Saint-Nazaire, to Jean Levy and others from Paris and also from
Hérouville-Saint-Clair and Oléron. These four structures opened with
rather small numbers, between 150 and 250 students enrolled and between
fifteen and twenty-five teachers per establishment.
These experimental high schools have unfortunately remained exceptions,
the various ministers who have succeeded one another have opposed
developing them in at least all the academies. The other three are still
operating, unfortunately the LAP, a self-managed high school in Paris,
was completed by the rectorate under the aegis of the ministry and by a
certain number of internal disagreements. The LAP has given way to the
LIP, an innovative high school in Paris. This LAP experience has
succeeded in opening up possibilities for thousands of students,
rejected or unsuited to the traditional school system, to find a place
to move forward. The LAP was both a place of study, where knowledge and
practices could be questioned, but was also a place of life where people
cooked, did activities, cleaned... Many young people, who had been
massacred in the traditional school system, could arrive, settle down,
take their time, express their doubts. The infernal pace of traditional
schools was not imposed, the rhythm of each person and their word respected.
The LAP had little to do with the high school that we all know for the
most part; the teachers were co-opted by the team, no headmaster
established, no hierarchy, no grades on Pronote or elsewhere, freedom of
attendance so no text messages sent to parents, no sanctions but
discussions, activities developed together... A way of working that
broke with everything that holds the carrot/stick school system
together. Many were able to find a place and prospects while they often
arrived with dark, destructive ideas. They said: "the LAP saved me".
This is the main reason why the end of the LAP is a disaster, it was a
unique place in the Île-de-France.
The attack was purely ideological on the part of the rectorate, the LAP
was not closed but its foundation abolished: self-management is over.
Co-optation is over. Free attendance, grades, decision-making in the
General Assembly, it's over. Everything that concretely formed the
essential foundation of the LAP is no more.
To better understand, we went to the rectorate on May 14, 2024, and
interviewed a teacher who came to support Pascal who was going through a
disciplinary council. (1)
The hierarchy had wanted to get rid of the LAP for a while, and it so
happens that last year a major internal crisis created a split in the
team over accusations made against a teacher for behavior of the order
of sexist and sexual violence, consisting mainly of inappropriate jokes
towards students. The split was over how to react. A majority of the
team thought that the issue should be resolved internally. Another
minority party wanted to refer the matter to the hierarchy and took it
upon itself to do so. The ministry, which was just waiting for this,
seized this opportunity to conduct an administrative investigation.
Three general inspectors summoned 70 people, selecting in particular
those who had made accusations. Parents, students, and teachers sent
letters. This investigation did not focus on the initial problem but
sought to accumulate individual faults that would attest to the
dangerousness of this place. Four colleagues out of 25 were suspended
for professional misconduct and two were placed in a disciplinary
council. The latter accused Pascal of remarks towards colleagues and of
having accompanied students who wanted to occupy the LAP during the
second round of the presidential elections. A bottle of wine had
accompanied their meals.
Most of the time, accusations of Sexist and Sexual Violence are swept
under the carpet in national education. At LAP, some students with
radical positions and some teachers who are sensitive to
intersectionality have stirred things up to the point where they no
longer know what to do with it. They refused to discuss. Our questions
were considered complacency, complicity with the aggressor. From the
moment there is an accusation, it is necessary to purge, to make the
person in question leave. No debate was possible. The only solution
given the proportions that the affair had taken, which they themselves
had fueled, seemed to them to be reporting to the rectorate.
The CGT Educ'action was present:
We defend the LAP project. We oppose the dismantling of the self-managed
high school that has been operating for more than forty years. The
attack that is being carried out against colleagues is above all carried
out to dismantle the LAP and its foundations; which are the co-optation
which consists of choosing one's colleagues to create a coherent
collective carrying the same project, self-management and free
attendance of students. Through the LAP, it is the education system as a
whole that is under attack. The LAP is an intolerable symbol in 2024,
the rectorate and the administration want to stick their noses into the
constitution of the teams, to decide everything without consultation. We
are currently in a logic of breaking the status, of questioning the
union organizations and the statutory commissions that allowed
discussions with the administration; all that is flying apart. If they
break the logic of co-optation, they break the educational and
pedagogical project of the LAP. For free attendance, we are in a
hyper-regulated society, with the SNU, the uniform... it is unbearable
for the administration to imagine that students might not come to
classes, knowing that they are students with a particular profile; no,
we have to know, put people in boxes, know where they are, at what time,
put cameras; that is the society we are in. At the CGT, we contest that
we cannot do things differently in an establishment, see things
differently, help students grow differently. The LAP has also been
attacked on the question of resources; Billions would have to be
recovered, among other things, to finance a war in Ukraine that no one
wants, and since the government does not want to go and get them from
the pockets of capital, well, we take them from the pockets of public
services. It is also about attacking individuals by isolating them,
which is why many of us are here today in front of the rectorate to
support our colleagues.
The SUD éducation union did not wish to comment.
Pascal, you were a math teacher for twenty-eight years at the LAP. You
went before a disciplinary board and were fired. If, at first, the LAP
was able to serve as an experimental guarantee, over time it became a
space to close.
There were three types of position. There are those who have been
political enemies from the beginning who were against it and who said
that school could not be a place where teachers and students do not
respect the hierarchy that is the matrix of republican education. There
were people who were real supporters, who defended the project and there
was a facade, the pride of highlighting this educational diversity but
without aligning it with the means. This support has clearly disappeared
since 2019-2020; for them, the LAP could no longer be a solution for
young people who are doing badly, the hostility has only grown over the
years. In 2022, the convention that governed the operation of the LAP
was due to expire. We were made to drag it out for almost a year by
being told to rewrite the new convention ourselves, but that never went
without being told why.
They were waiting for the moment to end it. What was the trigger? We
heard about inappropriate gestures and words, libertarian proselytism,
that was for you. What are the facts?
At the beginning of January 2023, for the first time, a principle was
called into question; students decide to hold a general meeting that is
forbidden to teachers, even though general meetings have always been
open to everyone. We went to see them: if you have something to say, you
have to be able to talk about it together, it is not possible for one
party to be excluded from the discussion based on their category. Among
teachers, we did not all agree, even though it was a strong operating
principle at the high school: every place is open to everyone. During
this meeting, students accused a teacher, above all, of making
unacceptable sexist remarks; he said my little one, my darling. They
wanted to investigate to find out if there were other things behind it
and encouraged all students who had things to say against him to do so.
Other accusations came: he allegedly entered the locker room and touched
a student's buttocks to catch her during a climbing exercise. They
wondered what to do with him and a number of students who claim to be
radical feminists thought that he had to be punished, that he had to get
out, that he had to be excluded. To exclude a teacher, you have to
inform the rectorate. The disagreement was that we are not going to
settle things with the rectorate because, for me, either they will
stifle the story or they will not be helpful.
Self-management means finding solutions to questions, to problems first
in the general meeting. Not always referring to those in power, which
legitimizes them. And also thinking of the answers beyond the sanction,
the penalty, the punishment. I share this idea and that as much as
possible we are our recourse and that it is analyzed from the inside. I
do not exclude that at times there are people who come from the outside,
but not in a hierarchical manner. From the moment the divide was
established which consists in saying that, if there is sexist violence,
it is out of the question to let it pass and that the hierarchy must
react, we could no longer agree, discuss. A minority of teachers decided
to report the matter to the rectorate, against the advice of the group.
For months, nothing happened and there was an incredible tension in the
school. Some completely lost their minds; letters of denunciation
continued to be sent. Something completely unthinkable in a
self-managed, anti-authoritarian environment. We found out about it a
long time later, when there were disciplinary councils, we had access to
the file, we would have thought we were in East Germany in the 50s and
60s when they opened the archives. The parents, seeing the disarray of
their children, caught up in this whirlwind, wanted to get involved,
wanted to understand, which is not a habit at the LAP. They wrote
letters about teachers they had never met. I would have said that the
Baccalaureate was only used to put sheep in boxes. Even if I have
criticisms to make about the Bac, this absurd sentence is not mine. The
only specific fact is that I accompanied an occupation evening the day
after the first round of the 2022 elections with Le Pen in the second
round. It was one of the teachers who had supported the action and who
had written "good evening of struggle" who, a year later, will find it
scandalous and denounce it. There were even two discussions at the Paris
city council where LR and Macronist elected officials who had received
notes from the rectorate said that there were scandalous attacks at the
LAP. The terms used by the teacher are out of place, which could have
been managed internally, in my opinion; they seem to me to have been
blown out of proportion by people who do not know what violence is. As
if the slightest problem absorbs all the malaise and serves as a
catalyst, which prevents us from looking for the real causes of it.
Relying on specific facts allows for a common basis for discussion,
while feelings are individual and untransmittable!
From the moment the terms violence or aggression are used, when the
person says they are a victim and qualifies them as such, it takes away
a lot of the collective referent. How can you question a feeling, you
can't even talk about it. Ultra strong qualifiers are said, while for
others it is insignificant. Here, I talk about it with hindsight, but in
the general meeting, you are immediately suspected of minimizing the
seriousness of what happened, you become a bastard. Discussion is not
possible. Words are mixed with individual sauce. It was impossible to
name the facts, to define what we are talking about and therefore to
find solutions together.
Were you accused of libertarian proselytism?
That made the former students laugh a lot. Everything that could be used
as grist to the rectorate's mill was used: we were an anarchist den, we
were proselytizing... When they had enough letters of denunciation, they
decided to launch an administrative investigation.
Beyond your individual case which must be particularly difficult to live
with, it is the death of a structure, the end of an experience that
saved thousands of young people that is to be deplored, especially when
we see the reasons that were used to destroy this project.
It is hard to take, there were a good ten of us who were removed without
any consideration obviously. Some find themselves resigning from
national education. For the students, it is super hard too; either they
stay at the LIP, or they have to find a place elsewhere, but where else?
It is a non-choice for the students and it is super hard for future
generations of students who will no longer have this small space that
allowed many young people to find a place. For me, that is the worst. It
is a political victory for the government and therefore a defeat for us.
We had a place that was not up to par in terms of scale, but which could
serve as a counter-model, questioning the school through practice. The
first level of analysis is, obviously, ok it's disgusting to see that
the power has massacred us and can erase the word self-management, but
we also need to analyze more finely what made us let ourselves be
massacred. I don't want to be defeatist, but it's true that for a long
time we've been losing a lot and gaining little. There are plenty of
alternative places that are being closed in health, in education. The
lesson we can learn from this is that our strength is to be together, to
defend our tools horizontally, that's what made us hold out for so long.
It's interesting to see people who talk about democracy and the defense
of minorities take power as such and impose their visions of things on
others, thinking that they are right, that they hold the truth. They put
forward their feelings as indisputable established facts. Emotion
becomes an incontestable argument. A minority can thus impose its will
in the name of a supposed unverifiable gravity. By focusing on a part of
the problems, they forget what they are going to lose and make others lose.
Nadia M, January 13
Note
1- You can listen to the program "Depoliticization killed the LAP" from
24 11 04 on actualitédesluttes.info
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4369
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
transform the school, with the idea of operating without hierarchy, by
developing a pedagogy that was thought of collectively. In 81, with the
arrival of the "socialists" in power, four experimental high school
projects were born. Savary, Minister of Education at the time, gave the
green light to Gabriel Cohn-bendit, Daniel's brother and many others
from Saint-Nazaire, to Jean Levy and others from Paris and also from
Hérouville-Saint-Clair and Oléron. These four structures opened with
rather small numbers, between 150 and 250 students enrolled and between
fifteen and twenty-five teachers per establishment.
These experimental high schools have unfortunately remained exceptions,
the various ministers who have succeeded one another have opposed
developing them in at least all the academies. The other three are still
operating, unfortunately the LAP, a self-managed high school in Paris,
was completed by the rectorate under the aegis of the ministry and by a
certain number of internal disagreements. The LAP has given way to the
LIP, an innovative high school in Paris. This LAP experience has
succeeded in opening up possibilities for thousands of students,
rejected or unsuited to the traditional school system, to find a place
to move forward. The LAP was both a place of study, where knowledge and
practices could be questioned, but was also a place of life where people
cooked, did activities, cleaned... Many young people, who had been
massacred in the traditional school system, could arrive, settle down,
take their time, express their doubts. The infernal pace of traditional
schools was not imposed, the rhythm of each person and their word respected.
The LAP had little to do with the high school that we all know for the
most part; the teachers were co-opted by the team, no headmaster
established, no hierarchy, no grades on Pronote or elsewhere, freedom of
attendance so no text messages sent to parents, no sanctions but
discussions, activities developed together... A way of working that
broke with everything that holds the carrot/stick school system
together. Many were able to find a place and prospects while they often
arrived with dark, destructive ideas. They said: "the LAP saved me".
This is the main reason why the end of the LAP is a disaster, it was a
unique place in the Île-de-France.
The attack was purely ideological on the part of the rectorate, the LAP
was not closed but its foundation abolished: self-management is over.
Co-optation is over. Free attendance, grades, decision-making in the
General Assembly, it's over. Everything that concretely formed the
essential foundation of the LAP is no more.
To better understand, we went to the rectorate on May 14, 2024, and
interviewed a teacher who came to support Pascal who was going through a
disciplinary council. (1)
The hierarchy had wanted to get rid of the LAP for a while, and it so
happens that last year a major internal crisis created a split in the
team over accusations made against a teacher for behavior of the order
of sexist and sexual violence, consisting mainly of inappropriate jokes
towards students. The split was over how to react. A majority of the
team thought that the issue should be resolved internally. Another
minority party wanted to refer the matter to the hierarchy and took it
upon itself to do so. The ministry, which was just waiting for this,
seized this opportunity to conduct an administrative investigation.
Three general inspectors summoned 70 people, selecting in particular
those who had made accusations. Parents, students, and teachers sent
letters. This investigation did not focus on the initial problem but
sought to accumulate individual faults that would attest to the
dangerousness of this place. Four colleagues out of 25 were suspended
for professional misconduct and two were placed in a disciplinary
council. The latter accused Pascal of remarks towards colleagues and of
having accompanied students who wanted to occupy the LAP during the
second round of the presidential elections. A bottle of wine had
accompanied their meals.
Most of the time, accusations of Sexist and Sexual Violence are swept
under the carpet in national education. At LAP, some students with
radical positions and some teachers who are sensitive to
intersectionality have stirred things up to the point where they no
longer know what to do with it. They refused to discuss. Our questions
were considered complacency, complicity with the aggressor. From the
moment there is an accusation, it is necessary to purge, to make the
person in question leave. No debate was possible. The only solution
given the proportions that the affair had taken, which they themselves
had fueled, seemed to them to be reporting to the rectorate.
The CGT Educ'action was present:
We defend the LAP project. We oppose the dismantling of the self-managed
high school that has been operating for more than forty years. The
attack that is being carried out against colleagues is above all carried
out to dismantle the LAP and its foundations; which are the co-optation
which consists of choosing one's colleagues to create a coherent
collective carrying the same project, self-management and free
attendance of students. Through the LAP, it is the education system as a
whole that is under attack. The LAP is an intolerable symbol in 2024,
the rectorate and the administration want to stick their noses into the
constitution of the teams, to decide everything without consultation. We
are currently in a logic of breaking the status, of questioning the
union organizations and the statutory commissions that allowed
discussions with the administration; all that is flying apart. If they
break the logic of co-optation, they break the educational and
pedagogical project of the LAP. For free attendance, we are in a
hyper-regulated society, with the SNU, the uniform... it is unbearable
for the administration to imagine that students might not come to
classes, knowing that they are students with a particular profile; no,
we have to know, put people in boxes, know where they are, at what time,
put cameras; that is the society we are in. At the CGT, we contest that
we cannot do things differently in an establishment, see things
differently, help students grow differently. The LAP has also been
attacked on the question of resources; Billions would have to be
recovered, among other things, to finance a war in Ukraine that no one
wants, and since the government does not want to go and get them from
the pockets of capital, well, we take them from the pockets of public
services. It is also about attacking individuals by isolating them,
which is why many of us are here today in front of the rectorate to
support our colleagues.
The SUD éducation union did not wish to comment.
Pascal, you were a math teacher for twenty-eight years at the LAP. You
went before a disciplinary board and were fired. If, at first, the LAP
was able to serve as an experimental guarantee, over time it became a
space to close.
There were three types of position. There are those who have been
political enemies from the beginning who were against it and who said
that school could not be a place where teachers and students do not
respect the hierarchy that is the matrix of republican education. There
were people who were real supporters, who defended the project and there
was a facade, the pride of highlighting this educational diversity but
without aligning it with the means. This support has clearly disappeared
since 2019-2020; for them, the LAP could no longer be a solution for
young people who are doing badly, the hostility has only grown over the
years. In 2022, the convention that governed the operation of the LAP
was due to expire. We were made to drag it out for almost a year by
being told to rewrite the new convention ourselves, but that never went
without being told why.
They were waiting for the moment to end it. What was the trigger? We
heard about inappropriate gestures and words, libertarian proselytism,
that was for you. What are the facts?
At the beginning of January 2023, for the first time, a principle was
called into question; students decide to hold a general meeting that is
forbidden to teachers, even though general meetings have always been
open to everyone. We went to see them: if you have something to say, you
have to be able to talk about it together, it is not possible for one
party to be excluded from the discussion based on their category. Among
teachers, we did not all agree, even though it was a strong operating
principle at the high school: every place is open to everyone. During
this meeting, students accused a teacher, above all, of making
unacceptable sexist remarks; he said my little one, my darling. They
wanted to investigate to find out if there were other things behind it
and encouraged all students who had things to say against him to do so.
Other accusations came: he allegedly entered the locker room and touched
a student's buttocks to catch her during a climbing exercise. They
wondered what to do with him and a number of students who claim to be
radical feminists thought that he had to be punished, that he had to get
out, that he had to be excluded. To exclude a teacher, you have to
inform the rectorate. The disagreement was that we are not going to
settle things with the rectorate because, for me, either they will
stifle the story or they will not be helpful.
Self-management means finding solutions to questions, to problems first
in the general meeting. Not always referring to those in power, which
legitimizes them. And also thinking of the answers beyond the sanction,
the penalty, the punishment. I share this idea and that as much as
possible we are our recourse and that it is analyzed from the inside. I
do not exclude that at times there are people who come from the outside,
but not in a hierarchical manner. From the moment the divide was
established which consists in saying that, if there is sexist violence,
it is out of the question to let it pass and that the hierarchy must
react, we could no longer agree, discuss. A minority of teachers decided
to report the matter to the rectorate, against the advice of the group.
For months, nothing happened and there was an incredible tension in the
school. Some completely lost their minds; letters of denunciation
continued to be sent. Something completely unthinkable in a
self-managed, anti-authoritarian environment. We found out about it a
long time later, when there were disciplinary councils, we had access to
the file, we would have thought we were in East Germany in the 50s and
60s when they opened the archives. The parents, seeing the disarray of
their children, caught up in this whirlwind, wanted to get involved,
wanted to understand, which is not a habit at the LAP. They wrote
letters about teachers they had never met. I would have said that the
Baccalaureate was only used to put sheep in boxes. Even if I have
criticisms to make about the Bac, this absurd sentence is not mine. The
only specific fact is that I accompanied an occupation evening the day
after the first round of the 2022 elections with Le Pen in the second
round. It was one of the teachers who had supported the action and who
had written "good evening of struggle" who, a year later, will find it
scandalous and denounce it. There were even two discussions at the Paris
city council where LR and Macronist elected officials who had received
notes from the rectorate said that there were scandalous attacks at the
LAP. The terms used by the teacher are out of place, which could have
been managed internally, in my opinion; they seem to me to have been
blown out of proportion by people who do not know what violence is. As
if the slightest problem absorbs all the malaise and serves as a
catalyst, which prevents us from looking for the real causes of it.
Relying on specific facts allows for a common basis for discussion,
while feelings are individual and untransmittable!
From the moment the terms violence or aggression are used, when the
person says they are a victim and qualifies them as such, it takes away
a lot of the collective referent. How can you question a feeling, you
can't even talk about it. Ultra strong qualifiers are said, while for
others it is insignificant. Here, I talk about it with hindsight, but in
the general meeting, you are immediately suspected of minimizing the
seriousness of what happened, you become a bastard. Discussion is not
possible. Words are mixed with individual sauce. It was impossible to
name the facts, to define what we are talking about and therefore to
find solutions together.
Were you accused of libertarian proselytism?
That made the former students laugh a lot. Everything that could be used
as grist to the rectorate's mill was used: we were an anarchist den, we
were proselytizing... When they had enough letters of denunciation, they
decided to launch an administrative investigation.
Beyond your individual case which must be particularly difficult to live
with, it is the death of a structure, the end of an experience that
saved thousands of young people that is to be deplored, especially when
we see the reasons that were used to destroy this project.
It is hard to take, there were a good ten of us who were removed without
any consideration obviously. Some find themselves resigning from
national education. For the students, it is super hard too; either they
stay at the LIP, or they have to find a place elsewhere, but where else?
It is a non-choice for the students and it is super hard for future
generations of students who will no longer have this small space that
allowed many young people to find a place. For me, that is the worst. It
is a political victory for the government and therefore a defeat for us.
We had a place that was not up to par in terms of scale, but which could
serve as a counter-model, questioning the school through practice. The
first level of analysis is, obviously, ok it's disgusting to see that
the power has massacred us and can erase the word self-management, but
we also need to analyze more finely what made us let ourselves be
massacred. I don't want to be defeatist, but it's true that for a long
time we've been losing a lot and gaining little. There are plenty of
alternative places that are being closed in health, in education. The
lesson we can learn from this is that our strength is to be together, to
defend our tools horizontally, that's what made us hold out for so long.
It's interesting to see people who talk about democracy and the defense
of minorities take power as such and impose their visions of things on
others, thinking that they are right, that they hold the truth. They put
forward their feelings as indisputable established facts. Emotion
becomes an incontestable argument. A minority can thus impose its will
in the name of a supposed unverifiable gravity. By focusing on a part of
the problems, they forget what they are going to lose and make others lose.
Nadia M, January 13
Note
1- You can listen to the program "Depoliticization killed the LAP" from
24 11 04 on actualitédesluttes.info
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4369
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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