At the end of the First World War, which saw the death of 1,393,000 French people, i.e. 10% of the active male population and 1/5 of men under 50, 700,000 widows and 1,100,000 orphans found themselves in a situation miserable and demand from the State the means to bring up their children properly. The law of March 31, 1919 creates the status of ward of the nation and recognizes the right to obtain a pension for the heirs of injured or deceased soldiers. The state also reserves civil service jobs for widows. Since then, the French State has been helping single women, families in need to educate their children, school, always compulsory and free, providing education. Single mothers have raised children, often several, for centuries without them becoming delinquents. It is an insult to mothers in difficult neighborhoods to consider the difficulties of life as obstacles to a good education.
Like everyone else, I move about in the public space with my phone and headphones. If I refuse to have my nose down on my phone while walking, I often listen to music or a radio program. One morning, by forgetting, here I am in a bourgeois street in Paris without music or voices in my ears to drown out the sounds of the street where clusters of fathers and mothers accompanied their children to school. I didn’t understand why I was uncomfortable. And suddenly: silence. While the street was filled with children. But the parents were all immersed in their smartphones, a child clinging to one hand, the second to the back pocket of the jeans. They only raised their heads vaguely to cross. The same parents certainly install their children in front of a screen in the restaurant so as not to be encumbered with questions.
The parental crisis is generalized. All social classes have been affected since the day a mother accompanied her 13-year-old daughter to get a tattoo and took the opportunity to do the same. Cronyism has replaced authority, without the expected results. Those who think they know their children by pulling on the same joint are wrong, it’s just an artifice, a “cool” varnish that keeps you further away. Parents so cool that they give their 12-year-old a smartphone and discover dumbfounded that he has taken the opportunity to watch porn; parents who are so passionate about the life of their cell phone that they don’t even realize that the shy little one is the terror of his class, harassing with infamous tweets another equally lost kid, who doesn’t never knew his parents except busy up to the dinner table where nothing is said, nothing is confessed, nothing is corrected, nothing is yelled at, nothing is imposed. It’s not Instagramable enough.
The fault of these educated sociologists
Subsidized sociologists, guys who were lucky enough to hear their parents tell them that you have to work at school to ensure a life worthy of the name, to be punished for stealing candy , to be taken back at the table when they said the wrong thing, in short, educated sociologists explain without blushing that it is difficult for a single mother to have authority over a teenager of 1.80 meters! But finally ! Do we really pay people to say such crap? How many millions of 1.50 meter tall mothers have raised a string of children alone, with no other quality than parental authority born of a natural distance and awareness of the verticality of any filial relationship?
Other sociologists (Didier Chabanet and Xavier Weppe) write in the French journal of public administration : “Libraries are then perceived as the imposition of another social group which intervenes in their territory without them being able to influence its action in any way whatsoever.” They take care to explain before arriving at this brilliant conclusion that culture has long been “synonymous with emancipation and social progress, particularly in popular circles” and that the library was then a “sacred place”.
They forget to specify, under the pretext of fantasized domination, out of dangerous miserabilism, that they have, these cardboard pedagogues, these petty-bourgeois academics in need of theses, removed the sacred from culture, installed victim laziness, and created the conditions for a conflagration without demands, a savagery without a goal, a revolt without a name.
* Abnousse Shalmani is a writer and journalist committed against the obsession with identity