President Emmanuel Macron’s plan for education to combat extremism should be strengthened by the horrifying killing of a teacher
It is difficult to convey the sheer horror of the decapitation last Friday of a French secondary school teacher, Samuel Paty, in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine near Paris. Such extreme violence is designed to terrorise and traumatise, and it does. Children should not under any circumstances be confronted with this level of brutality, let alone in the course of their education. France’s roughly 1 million teachers should have no reason to fear going to work.
It is a savage irony that President Emmanuel Macron recently announced additional funding for schools and an expansion of academic research on Islamic culture, as part of a package of measures in a new law against religious separatism. Official recognition that alienation and division are driven by poverty and lack of opportunity, as well as radical Islamist ideology, was overdue. The increased emphasis on inclusion was a hopeful sign, although the French aversion to recording ethnicity and religion in official data remains an obstacle to public policy with measurable outcomes.
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