Ban on the abaya at school, uniforms in poor neighborhoods… “We no longer do education, but moralisation”

“I decided we could no longer wear the abaya to school”, announced Gabriel Attal during the 20 hours of TF1 on Sunday 27 August. Brandishing the principle of secularism, he added: “When you enter a classroom you must not be able to identify the religion of the students by looking at them.” Two days later, Sabrina Agresti-Roubache, the city’s secretary of state, he said he was in favor of experimenting with the uniform in schools in popular neighborhoodsarguing that clothing was an indicator of social inequality.

These announcements precede a complicated return to school, marked by a great shortage of educational staff, committed to putting the pieces of the Blanquer baccalaureate reform back together and implementing specialty reforms in their institutions. a “communication of political ideology”, to participate in a political agenda aimed at far-right voters and divert attention from the real problems of national education, says Mathilde Blanchard, a union activist.

teenage questions

For actors and actresses in the field, wearing the abaya, a long dress that covers the arms and legs, remains a minority matter. It is also not considered a religious sign by the French Council of Muslim Worship, which announced it in a press release in early June. Fanny Gallot, an educational researcher, explains that the use of religious symbols, of which the abaya is only one part, accounted for only half of the 3,500 annual reports of attacks on secularism. By comparison, the breaches in the school fence represent… 4,400 reports. “It is an epiphenomenon that is intensified to create a media reality“says the researcher. “Abayas have been problematically constructed by politicians” in order to serve an Islamophobic project.

Furthermore, wearing religious dress in itself is not a matter that should lead to punishment or exclusion under the Secularism Act 2004.”In the field, when an attack on secularism is suspected, first of all it is necessary to identify whether it is a question of a questioning of adolescent identity or of proselytism“, explains Mathilde Blanchard, who works in a ZEP in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques. “In these cases, the concept of secularism and its importance within the establishment are discussed with the child and his family, and 95% of the time it goes well.She is concerned to see interrogation of teenagers criminalized and seen as a questioning of republican values:

“We no longer do education, but moralisation”.

Stigmatizing and marginalizing measures

According to Fanny Gallot, the introduction of uniforms in disadvantaged neighborhoods and the ban on wearing the abaya have one goal: to regain authority over young people in working-class neighborhoods. “The uniform itself is worn in many countries, but the question is how it is promoted and in what context“, she says. “This discussion comes after the popular youth uprisings of early summer. It is a way of imposing an authoritarian policy on a certain category of the population, of punishing young people. Where we claim to erase inequalities, we stigmatize.“Even the uniform itself can reveal inequalities, due to its condition, its color, the school to which it belongs.

“These controversies undermine the dignity of some students‘, says Romy Dematons Lakrouz, former IDF Colleges and High Schools Equal Opportunity Project Manager, and author of Decolonizing Progressivism in Islam (Ed. CALEM, 2022). “There really are lives at stake: that of the girls, that of their families, even their school career, which suffers from their marginalization due to their religious affiliation and their origins.She recounts the experiences of humiliation experienced by young girls in recent years due to their religious affiliation:

Many are vetted upon entering the premises based on the clothing they wear. Having to remove the veil or change clothes outside the school itself, following insults or harassment by teachers, can be very violent and humiliating. They are often summoned to the principal’s office or threatened with disciplinary counsel, far more serious punishments than those associated with wearing the abaya or headscarf.

Imagine having to measure the length of girls’ skirts at the entrance to schools. The teaching staff would therefore find themselves responsible for sexist and racial profiling: “Black girls will automatically be suspected of being Muslim as if that is a crime in itself. As Fatima Ouassak says: they are children. And because they are children and come from working class neighborhoods, they are considered dangerous. It is a violence that should not occur in the school system of our country which proclaims itself a model of freedom.”

The school, land of inequalities

“These controversies are just that: controversies that seem to have been born to create a diversion”, says Benoît Teste, general secretary of the FSU. “In our opinion, this is not the debate that should be the beginning of the school year.“According to him, the school is no longer able to achieve its objectives: the Blanquer reform of the baccalaureate, no longer concentrating it by sector, but by specialized subjects, has led to its devaluation.

“We need to make sense of the baccalaureate, discuss what we are doing with the previous reform and get everything back on track.And even before the baccalaureate, throughout the school career, the general secretary is concerned about the development of the discourse on fundamentals, which risks influencing the whole way teachers do pedagogy: “They try to make us teach in a mechanistic way, with almost a form of formatting of the students, and leaving aside the professionalizing sectors in particular. For us, an ambitious education must have the aim of increasing the level of education of the entire population.“

Faced with the devaluation of teaching, we are also witnessing a disaffection towards the teaching profession. According to Benoît Teste, posts are increasingly difficult to fill and the absence of some teaching staff will be felt very soon. “In just a few years, dropout rates have increased six-fold. When we asked to fill more posts, the minister replied, at the second level, that we could manage internally, i.e. adding a workload to the already overloaded teachers.“Schools in popular neighborhoods will be the first victims of this lack of funds and staff:

“The school, which was supposed to be a place of social ties, becomes a field where very strong inequalities are established”.

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