France could learn from us
HARVEY SIMMONS
Feb. 11, 2004. 01:00 AM
thestar.com
Canadians may find it hard to understand why a new French law will prevent students from wearing religious symbols in school. After all, why not let Muslim girls wear headscarves, Jewish students their yarmulkes, Sikhs their turbans or Christians their crucifixes?
If schools are supposed to help integrate people of all faiths and educate them in the democratic principles of tolerance and understanding, why in the world force religious students to choose between their religion and public school?
Moreover, because the new law bans only "conspicuous" religious symbols, schools will be forced into the ridiculous position of having to decide whether a Muslim schoolgirl who decides to wear, say, a bandana instead of a headscarf, or a Jewish student who wears a tiny Star of David, or a Christian student who dons a miniature crucifix, is flaunting a religious symbol.
Astonishingly, a majority of the French population, including teachers, support a law that will surely create a pack of trouble for the French. But why?
One reason has to do with France's long history of conflict between religious and secular authorities. For nearly a century and a half after the 1789 French Revolution, the Catholic Church did everything it could to bring down the Republic and restore a monarchy. This bred a fierce strain of anti-church sentiment among those who supported democracy and the Republic.
Over the years the battle went back and forth, satirized in countless French novels, plays and stories about the conflict between the village priest, representing the forces of religion, and the town schoolteacher who represented the forces of secularism.
Although the Catholic Church lost out when a 1905 law separated church and state, the revival of religion today, especially among Muslims, but also among Jews and Christians, has rekindled anti-clerical sentiment among those who fear the secular and democratic values represented by the public school system will be undermined as religion encroaches on the school system.
In the debate before the French National Assembly, some deputies fulminated against the idea that schools might ban pork from their menus in deference to Muslim and Jewish students and raged against examples of Muslim girls refusing, on religious grounds, to participate with boys in athletic activities.
After all, the French argue, the school should be a neutral meeting ground where children learn the basic principles of the French Republic, not an arena where the values of this or that religious community breeds hostility and distrust between children of different religions and between religious and secular children.
But, there is more to the debate than defending the secular nature of the French state and its school system.
Above all, the conflict revolves around the question of Muslim schoolgirls who insist on wearing headscarves to class.
Although debates in the National Assembly and in government commissions always mention Jewish yarmulkes, Christian crucifixes and Sikh turbans among the symbols to be banned, the fact is that it is the headscarves that provoked the controversy in the first place and continue to inflame passions.
For supporters of the law, the headscarves symbolize oppression.
The French government commission that recommended the new law recounts cases of young Muslim women forced by family or male relatives to wear the scarf or threatened with reprisals if they refused.
The commission also raised the issue of Muslim women teachers who, on religious grounds, resisted accepting the authority of women supervisors and asked for male supervisors instead.
On one side, then, a majority of the French believe that Muslim schoolgirls who wear headscarves do so not because of free choice, but because it has been imposed on them by the male members of their families or their community.
According to one government report, "Wearing religions signs, and most notably the headscarf, appears as a form of pressure and a source of conflict incompatible with the educative mission of the school and especially inconsistent with educating critical judgment." And in his speech to the nation on the new law, French President Jacques Chirac referred time and again to defending the "equality of the sexes."
On the other side, however, the opponents of the new law, who, remarkably, come from all sides of the political spectrum, argue that the law will throw religious students into the arms of fundamentalists, that it will be unenforceable and that to make absolutely no concession to religious students is to make of secularism itself a form of fundamentalism.
Surely, they say, French schools should adopt a more open style of secularism, one that would accept differences and would treat people equally, regardless of difference of race, sex or religion.
After all, if one object of the school system is to help young people develop into good citizens, then would it not be better to do everything possible to integrate children into the values of the Republic by bringing them into school rather than rejecting them because of closely held religious beliefs?
The government commission that prepared the new law took a cursory look at how the English, Germans, Italians and Dutch handled the question of students wearing religious symbols in schools.
It's too bad they didn't come to Canada. Whatever our continuing problems of trying to integrate religious students into a secular school system, we have at least avoided steaming full speed ahead toward the conflict and chaos the French now seem certain to have created for themselves.
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Harvey G. Simmons is professor emeritus at the Canadian Centre for German and European Politics at York University. |
