France: "We cannot ask the school to be in a position to face Islamism"

Before the national tribute this Wednesday at La Sorbonne, the colleagues of Samuel Paty, students, neighbors met Tuesday evening in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine in memory of the teacher murdered Friday October 16 at the exit of his college.

REUTERS / Lucien Libert

Text by: RFI Follow

4 min

A national tribute is paid this Wednesday at La Sorbonne to Samuel Paty, the teacher assassinated last Friday for showing caricatures of Muhammad to his students during a course on freedom of expression.

This terrorist attack has shaken the whole country in recent days and especially teachers.

Isabelle Saint-Martin, author of the book Can we talk about religions at school?

(Albin-Michel) and director of studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, is our guest. 

Publicity

Read more

Clémentine Pawlotsky

Isabelle Saint-Martin:

In France, the school is secular.

There is no denominational religious approach and neither is there a dedicated course, as you said.

We talk about it in history, in letters, in other disciplines.

The problem is often not so much in the programs themselves, in the teaching content, as in what is called the school experience.

That is to say the question of the veil, the canteen, the swimming pool, as has been mentioned.

And the difficulty (arises) when this school experience erupts in the classroom and blocks the (educational) discourse, the content of the teaching.

There may be a conflict of loyalty, that is to say that the students feel that what they are asked to learn is contrary to what we experience in their family, is contrary to the values ​​of their family.

So there, there are indeed situations of questioning, of conflicts that obviously should not be generalized, but it is true that there are establishments where there can be very sharp tensions.

And precisely are teachers today sufficiently armed, sufficiently prepared to face these conflicts of loyalty that you mention?

I think they are armed or trained to do pedagogy with their students.

They could be even more, we can evoke that, but where they are not enough, it is to manage the conflicts with the parents of the pupils who become more and more lively.

And there, we really tackle social issues that concern the Republic as a whole.

We cannot ask the school to be in a position to face Islamism, all the problems of society.

And you propose in your book an approach to the religious fact through the arts, through painting, master paintings.

Do you think caricature has its place in this approach?

Through the arts as a whole, everyday arts, architecture, objects ... I think that this allows to dispassionate the debate, by having something concrete, a mediation, a work to comment, to build a common look in the class on an artwork.

In this context, caricature can have its place and it does perfectly well in a course on freedom of expression, because we also learn to put it back in the long history of anticlerical caricature.

We learn to decipher a visual language, not to feel offended by a drawing.

This supposes an education of the gaze.

►

: Professor beheaded in France: 7 people presented to an anti-terrorism judge

►

Homage to Samuel Paty: words of teachers

Newsletter

Receive all the international news directly in your mailbox

I subscribe

Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application

google-play-badge_FR

• France

• Education

• Education

• Religion