The Head of State wishes to display his firmness. The government “will not let anything pass” on the abaya and the qamis, now prohibited in schools in the name of secularism, said this Friday, September 1 Emmanuel Macron.
“We know that there will be cases […] negligently perhaps, but a lot to try to challenge the republican system. We must be intractable,” said the head of state during a trip to a vocational school in Orange (Vaucluse).
Thursday evening, the Minister of Education Gabriel Attal sent a memo to the heads of establishments specifying that the wearing of the abaya and the qamis, Muslim outfits, “conspicuously manifests in the school environment a religious affiliation (and) does not can be tolerated there.
A clarification justified by Emmanuel Macron because “teachers, school heads must never be left alone in the face of the pressures they are subject to, or the challenges that exist on this subject”. These “hussars of the Republic” are “right to defend secularism” and “we must support them when they are threatened, jostled”, he insisted, assuring that “the State, the Republic is behind them”.
As proof, he promised that “in the high schools or colleges which are the most sensitive, specific staff will be seconded alongside the heads of establishments and teachers to support them and also to engage in the necessary dialogue with families and students”.
The new Minister of National Education, Gabriel Attal, announced on Sunday the banning of this long traditional dress covering the body worn by certain Muslim students. The new rule also concerns the wearing of qamis, the male version of this garment.
“Post-baccalaureate training” for teachers
On the sidelines of this trip to Orange, Emmanuel Macron also indicated that he had asked his minister to work on “post-baccalaureate training” for teachers, in order to allow young people to be trained earlier in this job.
“What I asked the minister is to work on training. What we want to do is also post-baccalaureate training, professionalizing, more visible, which will allow us to plan better our needs, and in a way to return to a system that we knew in the past, which worked, which is a bit like that of the Normal Schools”, indicated the Head of State. “We must be able to allow our young bachelors and bachelors who want to pursue this beautiful profession to be trained in the fundamental knowledge necessary for the teaching profession from post-baccalaureate, to have an integrated training, which will also allow us in relation to the needs that we know in 3, 4, 5 years from now to have the right recruitment system and not simply to open competitions year after year”, he added.
A little earlier, during a videoconference with heads of vocational high schools, President Macron had already indicated that he had asked the minister to “work” on this system “in the coming months”, to “qu ‘we can mount it in the spring and deploy it’. “I think we need to completely change the recruitment system for our teachers,” he added, without specifying whether this new system would concern primary and secondary teachers and whether it would be the only possible way of training. .