Tribune. Alexandre Portier, LR MP for the Rhône and member of the Higher Council of Programs, reacts to the use of the term "school segregation" by the Minister of National Education.

The much-heralded revolution in terms of school diversity has ended in farce. But all is not lost for the minister. What Pap NDIAYE loses politically, on the surface, he gains ideologically, in the field of the ideas he imposes. Today, that of segregation.

A school war has indeed taken place To be convinced of this, one only has to read the press kit of the ministry. All the official thinking of the boss of the rue de Grenelle is based on this notion of segregation. Pap
NDIAYE himself stated on France Culture that "France is one of the OECD countries where school segregation is the strongest". This is therefore not an error, but rather the cardinal point of the ministerial doctrine.

If the goal was to impose this sociological reading in the debate, the operation was successful. The entire press took it up massively. Behind this tragicomedy on diversity, our school history has therefore experienced a political moment. Yes, let's not be mistaken, a school war has indeed taken place.

The Overton window has widened far to the left, even far to the west. To the west, far from the realities experienced by teachers in the field. But to the west, too, by imposing a social reading brutally imported from the United States.

School segregation, an intellectual scandal

Pap NDIAYE makes "school segregation" such an obvious problem that it no longer needs to be demonstrated in France. However, the concept is neither clear nor effective.

As Nobel Prize winner in economics Thomas SCHELLING rightly pointed out, segregation is a process that "arises from organized action, legal or illegal, by force or simply by exclusion" (The Tyranny of Small Decisions, 1978). Coming from work on the Jewish ghettos of Central Europe or on South African apartheid, the notion is supposed to designate a voluntary act, as recalled by the Latin root of the word, segregare.

Behind the pseudo-scientificity with which the ministry adorns the idea of ​​segregation, how can one not be astounded to see a minister of the Republic use a term that originally designated the exclusion policies experienced by Poland in 1940 or South Africa in 1948? Even more serious, how can one imagine that a minister of the Republic could affirm that there is a voluntary action in our country to marginalize a part of its population? This is not a political accident, it is an intellectual scandal.

The politics of the imaginary sick person

Here we have the whole ideology which largely dominates across the Atlantic, and which Pap NDIAYE, a specialist in American history which he clearly knows better than French history, is trying to impose on our public debate.

School is now presented as a place that institutionalizes discrimination and that should therefore be transformed to respond to it. However, analyzing everything in terms of domination is a characteristic trait of wokism, as the philosopher Pierre-Henri TAVOILLOT points out.

Let's be clear: Pap NDIAYE has a subversive and even negative vision of the School.

Far from the positivism of the fathers of the Republic, our minister is at the forefront of a movement that considers that the School is no longer there to transmit a common culture: no, the School is there to deconstruct social behaviors. Pap NDIAYE is the worthy heir of Najat VALLAUD-BELKACEM.

Once again, the denial is total. The students are not really bad, just badly mixed. In the end, it is only a question of distribution, of social organization. Let's break the thermometers; the evil will disappear. Let's spread out the difficulties, and they will be resolved as if by magic. It is the politics of the imaginary invalid.

Except that when we arbitrarily give 16 to students in EMC (moral and civic education), when they have not had lessons during the year, due to lack of a teacher, as happened again recently, the problem is not school segregation: it is the management of National Education. Reality always ends up reminding us.