[by Emmnuelle Hénin]
The National Higher Institute of Teaching and Education is at the forefront of Progress, and of truth: it shows the way in the making of the new Man, or rather of the new man.woman. I was able to experience this by accidentally entering a room at the Inspé of Paris-Sorbonne. Indeed, the institute is backed by a primary school of application: the guinea pigs are within reach, the playground directly adjoins the rooms of Inculcation of Ideology to apprentice teachers, like in an Orwell novel.
Since it is important to (de)form minds as early as possible, children are required to fight against "gender stereotypes" from the first grade. The National Education has therefore concocted posters entitled "Let's break stereotypes", which present specimens of liberated humanity: a girl is dressed as a knight, another has boxing gloves (because we never learn too early to defend ourselves against patriarchal aggression); next to her, a boy peacefully plays with skipping rope, to reassure his peers that he will never claim the slightest virility. Boys and girls (we blush to use these outdated expressions) play together against an abstract green background, evoking less a school (no benches, blackboard or pen) than a virtual green zone close to organic nirvana. The poster seems in this way to illustrate the program of the ecologist mayors: degender schoolyards, that is, prohibiting boys and girls from amusing themselves as they wish, while gendering municipal budgets at the same time – do not look for the logic other than to deconstruct for the pleasure of it, and in passing, to divert attention from the gigantic challenges that National Education would have to face, if it were faithful to its original mission. This idyllic picture would be incomplete without an equal presence of whites and “non-whites” or “racialized”, and in this case, we are served: a Black woman wearing a white coat and chemistry equipment shows that she is the only one who cares about learning and her professional future (why the only one?), while in the foreground, an equally black boy is probably destined for a career as a juggler. The caricatured figure of this juggler leaves one wondering about the progress in the fight against racism.
The classroom decor allows us to discover the result of this propaganda, through several children's drawings. Each one drew themselves and wrote their profession of faith: "My name is Jade and I have my hair so it doesn't hide my eyes", "My name is Félix and I wear dresses because I find them pretty and comfortable", "My name is Mari and I like to play because I win and it's fun", "My name is Martin, I like to play with dolls". The spelling mistakes displayed prominently in the classroom are probably a subject of amusement, or of tenderness - what can you do, we can't take care of everything, rehabilitation has long taken precedence over so-called "fundamental" learning.
We are reduced to imagining the rest, the educational sequence that we did not witness. Anyone who has ever met six-year-old children understands that they did not make these drawings spontaneously, and that these sentences did not come out of their imagination on their own. How did the teacher proceed, what suggestion technique did he use? "Are you sure you are a boy? And what makes you think so, the fact that you are wearing trousers? But why wouldn't you wear a skirt, after all? It's so comfortable! Besides, in the time of kings, all children wore them" (the teacher could conveniently bring out a file from the time of Najat Vallaud-Belkacem that shows this). All this with the best intentions in the world: to lead the individual in the making to discover his freedom, to get rid of his prejudices and to break ties with all natural determination.
Vincent Peillon was imprudent enough to dream it out loud ("Children do not belong to their parents. They belong to the State"), he had to quickly resign. Belkacem introduced the ABCD of Equality, but the parents' associations rebelled. Now, the lobbies know how to do it and operate quietly, much more effectively and much more radically. For several years, the Inspé has included modules in teacher training to "fight transphobia" and "raise awareness of the transidentity/transgender issue", embellished with "artistic performances to fight homophobia and transphobia". A research engineer is even paid to steer the programs in this direction. Ideological reproduction is assured for the coming decades, but its corollary, the definitive collapse of the school, will not wait that long.
