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Ed Webb

French Education Minister Pap Ndiaye Is at the Center of France's Culture Wars - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...-pap-ndiaye-education-minister

France education politics race communal identities

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Jul 22 - Cached
  • Pap Ndiaye, a 56-year-old history professor specializing in American politics, looks the very model of a soft-spoken academic in tortoiseshell horn-rimmed glasses.  Ndiaye is the first Black education minister of France. A similar historical milestone in the United States would have been prominently noted in articles about his sudden rise in politics. But in a country that prides itself on being officially colorblind—to the extent that the government keeps no statistics on the racial or ethnic makeup of its population—this fact was omitted even in press coverage of his critics, who fretted that he would fling wide the doors of French classrooms to American-style “wokisme.” (That word resonates with some French parents and politicians the same way “critical race theory” does with some Americans.)
  • Blanquer focused on the teaching of basic skills and introduced free breakfasts for children in poor neighborhoods; he may be best known today for a group he co-founded dedicated to French republican principles like secularism and humanism and critical of what they perceive as the contagion of “woke” ideas from American campuses
  • Critics view an emphasis on racial matters as a nefarious U.S. import —like Coca-Cola, only with the risk not to the consumer’s waistline but to the national psyche, which they say will be debilitated by American-style culture wars.
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  • it wasn’t until living in the United States that he reflected upon what it meant to be Black
  • Ndiaye’s rapid elevation from the director of a humble national monument to the head of France’s education ministry marks a leap of faith by Macron, who described Ndiaye as an example of universalism and equal opportunity when they appeared together at an elementary school in Marseille last month. Having survived a recent reshuffling of the president’s cabinet, Ndiaye has moved from managing the Porte Dorée Palace, an institution with around 100 employees and an annual budget of 15 million euros, to leading the country’s largest public institution, with more than 1.2 million employees, an annual budget of more than 55 billion euros, and the responsibility of educating more than 12 million public school students
  • France operates a highly centralized public education system, with the education ministry managing the nation’s schools from Paris. Ever since waves of immigrants arrived after World War II, during a period the French refer to as the “30 glorious years” of rebuilding and economic expansion, schools have been perceived as imparting certain ideals about French citizenship. Even slight changes to the curriculum may be put under the microscope. 
  • “When you have even the smallest commitment to the United States, they think you talk on behalf of Americans,” the Senegalese-born French politician said in a recent phone call. “The French are fascinated by America, but at the same time they are very careful about being under U.S. influence. They want to think that their culture is different from the community-oriented model of the United States.”
  • “What’s confusing is that you had in the previous government a line of assertive secularism that was very opposed to any conversation on race, which in the French context is very delicate,” Belin said. “Macron has demonstrated a willingness to tackle some of the most difficult elements of the French colonial period, moving the conversation forward on Algeria and Rwanda. He is a modernizer for France’s history, but not particularly avant-garde on racial justice and postcolonial matters.”
  • Nathalie Heinich, a French sociologist, said that she thought Ndiaye’s report for the Paris Opera demonstrated “a sociological misunderstanding of an actual problem” that should be addressed by reducing socioeconomic inequalities. She felt that Ndiaye’s analysis had been influenced by his time living in the United States, with its multicultural social model, “which tends to reduce individuals to their belonging to collective entities.”
  • Somewhat controversially, for France, he has referred to systemic racism in housing, employment, and in police relations with the Black and immigrant communities. But compared with U.S. academics plowing similar terrain, his views are relatively moderate
  • Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a hard-left political figure who placed third in the presidential race in April, scorned the new cabinet when it was announced in May but singled out Ndiaye as an “audacious” choice—echoing the Revolution-era words of Georges Danton, who called for “audacity, more audacity, always audacity.”
  • Some role models whom Ndiaye has referenced over the years—Frantz Fanon, Césaire, and Léopold Sédar Senghor—were Black French colonial authors who in one way or another turned to politics.
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