Intercultural Education in France

Abstract

In the preceding chapters, all the countries that we have dealt with have had a federal form of government granting a large measure of autonomy in educational management to their regions. This is not the case for the French education system, which remains largely centralized with regard to strategies dealing with cultural diversity in the school.

1 Introduction

In the preceding chapters, all the countries that we have dealt with have had a federal form of government granting a large measure of autonomy in educational management to their regions. This is not the case for the French education system, which remains largely centralized with regard to strategies dealing with cultural diversity in the school.

The French school was founded on a monocultural and universalist tradition. Indeed, since its institutionalization during the epoch of Jules Ferry at the end of the nineteenth century, the school has always adopted an assimilationist approach in accordance with the role that the State has conferred upon it in the transmission of Republican values. It had to contribute to the formation of citizens who were equal so as to ensure better social cohesion and to bring forth a united nation. Public education is national, lay and directed at individuals. In fact, French law does not recognize any ethnic, community or minority group. In the name of Republican ideology, cultural characteristics are not taken into consideration (Meunier, 2007).

Since the creation of the free, compulsory and lay school, the different cultures of children enrolled in the school have never been recognized by the educational institution. Official texts did not acknowledge any specific measures for the entry of foreign or culturally different pupils.

Therefore, for a long time, cultural diversity was considered as a problem that should be overcome:

In France, the question of how to deal with cultural diversity does not exist, outside crises and controversy […] However, the school cannot remain indefinitely without direction. Systematically denied in the name of universality or, on the contrary, hypostasized in the name of difference, culture is at the heart of historic, social, ideological, affective and symbolic issues (Abdallah-Pretceille, 1999, p. 4–5).

The two terms “intercultural” and “multicultural” did not exist in French-language dictionaries before the 1990s. They became the subject of numerous ideological battles and they have acquired controversial meanings (Bourse, 2017).

In this chapter, we will analyse first the emergence of a debate on the acceptance of cultural diversity by the French education system and then the evolution of intercultural approaches in this country. In a third part, we will show that the consideration of diversity was diluted in the context of urban policies with a strong aversion to communitarianism. In the fourth part of this chapter, we will tackle the analysis of school performance of pupils with migratory origins in France.

2 The Emergence of Interculturality

Following the influx of foreign pupils arising from Southern Europe and the former French colonies in Africa, from the 1970s onwards the French school’s assimilationist educational tradition began to crumble. Intercultural education in France therefore dates from the 1970s, the moment when the traditional assimilationist approach to migrant cultures in the school began to be replaced by a readiness for integration, at least in speeches, through the creation of specific structures within the education system (Bailble, 2006).

This new acceptance of interculturality by the French school resulted in the emergence of different practices (Kerzil, 2002). First, a distinction was drawn between French and foreign pupils. This move allowed the development of specific arrangements for taking care of pupils with migratory origins. The creation of “integration classes” (CLIN) and “integrated catch-up classes” (CRI) at the primary level and “adaptation classes” in lower secondary education (CLAD) were aimed at children of foreign origin so that they could learn the French language as rapidly as possible.

The purpose of setting up integration, adaptation and integrated catch-up classes was to facilitate the enrolment of pupils whose original culture and language placed them at a disadvantage with regard to the school’s teaching and linguistic practices. The fact that a distinction was drawn among the pupils according to their sociocultural origins represented a complete upheaval within the school originally unsympathetic to any kind of difference whatsoever. Clearly, the emergence of interculturality in France was undertaken under the aegis of prudence and hesitation. The integration classes limited themselves to teaching literacy to the new arrivals and initiation to the French language, while the integrated catch-up courses consisted of providing the pupils arising from immigration and already following the regular teaching programme with a few extra hours of French so as to “compensate” for a proven weakness in that language. At the lower secondary level, the adaptation classes played a similar role in raising language skills.

Diversity was therefore only a transitory phenomenon, since the objective of the different arrangements was to promote success in the school thanks to a better mastery of French. These arrangements were introduced in order to respond to the educational difficulties of children with migratory origins by facilitating, through their mastery of French, both their social integration and their educational success (Meunier, 2007).

The emergence of interculturality in France was, therefore, as in Switzerland, clearly associated with the reception of immigrant workers’ children. Underlying this desire to welcome them, the presence of these children could have presented a problem for the education system due to their cultural and linguistic characteristics.

3 Intercultural Approaches and Their Development

In an official report, which was a landmark for the Ministry of National Education, the anthropologist Jacques Berque pointed out the incongruity of measures at that time concerning the schooling of immigrant children. He recommended, furthermore, the reversal of attitudes towards the young people from elsewhere, but who found themselves living in French society (Berque, 1985).

One could say that the moment when, in the present report, we grasp the problem of immigration is when it is no longer the isolated socio-economic fact that it has been for so long, but a problem henceforth within French society, even within the awareness of the youngest of its population (Berque, 1985, p. 6).

Dismissing the idea that cultures associated with immigration may represent a threat for French identity, Berque suggests that they should be considered as “contributive cultures”.

To treat the children of immigration as potential contributors to our cultural identity is neither to absorb them into it nor to cut them off from it by isolating them within their particular values. To accept them is neither to destroy the school nor French culture. It is to adopt a radicalism comparable to those transformations taking place in the world at this moment (1985, p. 50).

The contribution of Berque is fundamental in the origins of developing intercultural approaches in France, to the extent that his official report broke with the French school’s assimilationist and monocultural traditions:

The culture in which we have formed all the pupils must henceforth, without ceasing to be our national culture, enrich itself with the contribution of other cultures, of which the children of migrants are the vectors. French culture possesses an ancient humanist tradition which consents to this opening up to prospects. The cultural benefits that will be obtained in this way will certainly go beyond the school. It thus becomes, in fact, a true national opportunity (Berque, 1985, p. 17).

The years 1975 and 1976 represented an important step in the development of intercultural approaches in France. First, the government officially authorized the uniting of families allowing thousands of children to rejoin their migrant parents and to benefit from a French education. Second, the same year saw the creation of the Centres de formation et d’information pour la scolarisation des enfants de migrants (CEFISEM—Training and Information Centres for the Schooling of Migrants’ Children). These were small, academic cells bringing together a few people, mostly teachers or teacher-training staff, who intervened in continuing education on specific matters: teacher training for “initiation classes” or “integrated catch-up courses” (CRI), receiving teachers of the original language and culture (ELCO) and supporting teaching teams on demand beyond the national education system’s authorized provision.

These arrangements were created with the objective of responding to the educational difficulties of children with migrant origins by supporting both their social integration and their educational success through their command of French.

Then, from 1975 onwards, France progressively introduced “teaching language and cultural heritage” (ELCO) within the framework of uniting migrant families and the agreements signed with the principal countries from which the migrants came (Algeria, Italy, Morocco, Portugal, Spain and Tunisia). Behind it was the idea that knowledge of the original language and culture was not likely to be a factor that could harm the pupils whose parents were immigrants, but could easily be a means which would encourage their educational integration in France or their eventual return to their parents’ country of origin. This having been said, just as we observed in the Canton of Geneva, the “native” pupils did not have access at this time to teachers of original languages and cultures, which contributed to the marginalization of these courses or at least to upholding their extra-curricular nature.

The introduction of ELCOs represented a distortion of the Republican school’s neutrality and presented it therefore in the form of a differentialist approach. It was one of the first times that an aspect of the pupils’ cultural identity was accepted within the French education system by authorizing, according to the pupil’s origin, the teaching of a language other than French.

It was during this same period that the homogenization of compulsory schooling was achieved (1975), with the creation of a single collège (lower secondary education), which brought together both the pupils finishing their compulsory schooling and those continuing on to the lycée (upper secondary).

In 1978, interculturality was accessible to all pupils. The circular of 25 July 1978 broadened ELCO’s activities to all of them, and this in an intercultural perspective. For the first time in France, the term “intercultural” was used for the entire educational enterprise in an official text. The Ministry of National Education launched the first activities under the sign of interculturality, of training and of dialogue with, for example, from 1978 to 1980, the “National Week of Dialogue between the French and the Immigrants” (Keyhani, 2012). This innovation resulted from the influence of the Council of Europe’s work, which inspired European education systems to develop an intercultural approach within the school and to encourage in this way an awareness of the interest in reciprocal contact on cultural identities. However, despite this invitation to openness, it should be understood that the ELCOs were concerned largely with pupils whose cultural origin was associated with the languages being taught.

Over time and ever since their creation, the ELCOs in France were the subject of numerous reproaches, the most important being those accusing the teachers of strengthening communitarianism among the populations with migrant origins and thereby hampering the integration process. For this reason, the Haut Conseil à l’intégration (HCI—Superior Council for Integration) recommended in its first report in 1991 the suppression of this initiative since it seemed contrary to the objectives of integration.

Likely to strengthen communitarian positions, the ELCOs may lead to communitarianism while the Republicanism that should be taught cannot be created from a conglomeration of different groups. Some of our contacts fear that some ELCOs would become “Islamic catechisms” (HCI, 2010, p. 29).

However, the HCI did not propose a complete break with the original culture; on the contrary, it suggested integrating and developing the languages of migration in a common teaching course on modern languages.

It should still be noted that, even if the ELCOs in France provided courses in several languages (Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Turkish), it was often Arabic and the threat of the “Islamization” of these courses that became the target of accusations. The fear of a communitarian backlash and, to repeat the phrase of the Le Monde newspaper, “the suspicion of religious proselytism” (Collas, 2016) encouraged some political decision-makers to bring a halt to these arrangements (Table 1).

Table 1 Intercultural approaches introduced in France (1975–2015)

In 2016, the Ministry of National Education carried out a transformation of the ELCOs on the basis of a critical evaluation of their procedures, which brought to light the uneven quality of teachers who were not always well trained, spoke French imperfectly and were not properly supervised. A French public TV (France 24) then described the ELCOs’ final stages: in 2016 they had been labelled “international teaching of foreign languages (EILE). Today, the Minister foresees a necessary reform of these courses”.¹

At the end of the 1990s, there was a return to a reinforced secularism which was associated with the raising of questions about interculturality (Coq, 1995; Baubérot, 1996). This evolution was the result of several phenomena:

• A social crisis in the suburbs;

• A rise in political support for the extreme right;

• Pupils bearing religious symbols in the school;

• The fear of fundamentalism and Islamic terrorism.

In this movement, educational policies favoured a return to the newly decentralized Republican model with the installation of the Contrat éducatif local (CEL—Local Education Contract).

The reform of national education introduced by Claude Allègre (1998) encouraged a contractual policy for education based on a “town contract”. Furthermore, considering that “indifference between men” (HCI, 1993) is the fundamental justification for the universalist call for Republican ideology, the integration model promoted by HCI rejects all difference. To put it another way, all cultural and linguistic differences are effaced or confined to an individual’s private life.

4 The Fear of Communitarianism: Interculturalism Watered Down in the Locality and in Urban Politics

Since the recognition of cultural communities is not foreseen, cultural plurality in the school would be gradually defined as a local scheme for integration. By confronting national cohesion with the cultural plurality of French society, this new approach reduced interculturality to local contexts and the initiative of individuals, in consultation with local communities (Lorcerie, 1993).

Vermès (1997) makes a distinction between the “official logic” and the “basic logic” in intercultural education. Concerning official logic, three types of intercultural education existed at that time in France: (a) the schooling of foreign children; (b) teaching in the original language and culture; and (c) the Europeanization of the school. The basic logic consists of: (d) language courses provided by associations connected with immigration; (e) pressure from regional movements on French national education; and (f) the vitality of bilingual education. The division observed in France between, on the one hand, educational practices focused on the children of migrants and, on the other, actions oriented to regional minorities and the Europeanization of the curriculum, are harmful for intercultural education. As a result, the division towards openness to other cultures between a European and another non-European element strengthened the feeling of exclusion affecting some ethnocultural minorities and particularly those originating in former French colonies.

Even if the conceptual and regulatory barriers were maintained for a long time in France, institutional structures evolving from closed ones (CLIN and CLAD) towards open ones (educational units for non-French-speaking arrivals and for children of Roma communities) are evidence of the public powers’ confidence in the need to include all pupils in the education system. However, the paradigm of inclusion did not encounter the same success in all regions (Rigoni, 2017).

After the 1990s, it is possible to observe in France a marked return to laicity, the remobilization of citizens’ power (Guerraoui, 2015) and the calling into question of the school’s mild opening to interculturality. As Schnapper (1995) has emphasized, the school in France was at the service of citizenship:

The public school’s organization, both as an instrument and an expression of this policy, took no notice of regional characteristics, nor of national origins, nor of the pupils’ religious beliefs. It treated them all uniformly and equally as future citizens by giving them exactly the same education (Schnapper, 1995, p. 148).

Recently, religious differences have drawn the attention of political and educational decision-makers to the wearing of the Islamic veil in the school and the danger that this represented, especially for the maintenance of a lay school and Republican values (Fath, 2006; Gaudin, Portier and Saint-Martin, 2014). Constantly, the discussion on the management of cultural differences in France has been focused on the need to reject the Anglo-Saxon model of communitarianism. However, this latter model may be considered, at least in part, as a French device intended to distance oneself more than a historic reality from Anglo-Saxon societies whose ethnic divisions were not created by multiculturalism.

5 The Educational Performance of Migrant Young People

International studies, such as PISA (OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment), tend to show that the French education system is frequently awarded the classification of “average” while preserving inequalities. Thus, the data gathered by OECD in 2016 provided evidence of an unequal system with a wide margin between the most successful and the least successful pupils (OECD, 2016).

Even though socio-economic differences are the cause of numerous inequalities observable in the French education system, the status of migrant may also have an impact on a pupil’s school career.

In 2003, the situation is relatively classic: the higher the parents’ diplomas, the higher the pupils’ score independent of their migratory status. However, the pupils of the first and second generation—“all other things being equal”—achieve poorer scores than the natives, which may be due to attributes not featuring in the analysis. An unusual situation should also be noted concerning second-generation pupils whose parents graduated from higher education: their scores were lower than those of first-generation pupils in comparable family situations. What happened in 2012? The situation for native pupils whose parents had an intermediate or higher-level diploma remained stable. For the others (natives with a poor cultural background and first- and second-generation pupils), the level of learning drops dramatically, to the extent that the effect of the parents’ diploma on the score in mathematics becomes very weak for the first- and second-generation pupils. It was as if their learning stagnated without going beyond a score of 480, quite independent of the level of their parents’ diploma (Fouquet-Chauprade, Felouzis and Charmillot, 2016, p. 23).

This analysis shows that the cultural capital of families is the most important element, but that migration might explain certain inequalities. Furthermore, it seems that the decline of quality in the education system had a greater impact on the pupils of migrant origins than on the native pupils (CNESCO, 2016). On this subject, the authors explain that two theories enable the inequalities of the French education system to be explained:

• 1. “Cultural discontinuity”: “the pupils arrive unequal at the school in terms of their cultural background, their language level, and their familiarity with the qualities appreciated at the school” (CNESCO, 2016, p. 17).

• 2. “Systematic discrimination”: “in fact, educational provision is not ‘indifferent to differences’, since it gives more to pupils who already have more” (CNESCO, 2016, p. 17).

CNESCO (2016) demonstrates that, in France, migratory origin and status (particularly whether first or second generation) have an important impact on school achievement: “Thus, the Turkish and Sahelian immigrants’ children have an average mark lower than the children of natives, while the children of Chinese and South-East Asian immigrants have a higher mark” (CNESCO, 2016, p. 48). Evidently, one could imagine that the dramatic change of culture would have had a greater impact on families coming from certain contexts, while it was less so for those whose way of life was closer to the French school culture. Nevertheless, one should take note of these two theories attempting to explain inequalities and include in our analysis the matter of “systemic discrimination” (CNESCO, 2016, p. 17), which does not always permit the pupils having the most difficulty and the most remote from the school culture to keep up and to enjoy the same opportunities as the native pupils.

It also seems worthwhile for us to examine another analysis of the French school. In this case, it is the study by Felouzis (2003), which gives us an opportunity to look beyond the legal status of pupils (national versus non-national) and to pay attention to their original culture. Based on a classification of origins, Felouzis reached a series of conclusions that sustain the idea of a French education system that was unequal:

• The pupils in the group “Maghreb, Black Africa and Turkey […] accumulate social and educational handicaps” (Felouzis, 2003, p. 424);

• “[…] more than three-quarters [of the group mentioned above] (76.5%) come from a disadvantaged milieu; more than half of them are from families with four or more children (50.5%)” (p. 424);

• “[…] only 48% arrive ‘early’ or ‘on time’ at the school” (p. 424);

• This group of pupils is over-represented in the “SEGPA”, which is the section reserved for pupils in great difficulties at the school (Felouzis, 2003).

The educational inequalities in France are also reflected in school enrolment. Felouzis (2003) reveals that some schools are segregated and have a very high proportion of pupils with migrant origins. He says on this subject: “Only 10% of establishments enrol 40% of these pupils [from the Maghreb, Black Africa, Turkey group], which is eight times more than the regional average!” [for the Bordeaux region] (Felouzis, 2003, p. 429). The problem is not so much to identify the pupils’ nationalities in each school, but how this lack of heterogeneity influences their school careers. For Audren and Baby-Collin, the most segregated secondary schools “frequently suffer from a tarnished image and obtain educational outcomes inferior to those of colleges in the middle-class districts” (2017, p. 1). The Republican ideal of equality is therefore badly shaken by the geographical and socio-economic distribution of school achievement. Even though initiatives, such as the priority education zones, have been launched in France (Audren and Baby-Collin, 2017), there are numerous challenges that remain to be overcome. Indeed, CNESCO (2016) explains that these establishments are not the most suitable for learning, offering shorter teaching periods and a school climate unsympathetic to the pupils …

The absence of social heterogeneity is associated with a lower degree of citizenship, less tolerance, the powers of communication and thinking less profound, a more defiant attitude in these institutions … (CNESCO, 2016, p. 33).

Evidently, the pupils’ educational outcomes are an essential element to be considered in the analysis of inequalities. However, the well-being of the school climate, one’s self-esteem or even the perception of one’s origins seem to us to be equally important aspects that should also be considered. Segregation associated with inadequate school achievement (preventing access to the same possibilities as the other pupils) can communicate a negative image of oneself and of one’s group membership. These distinctions between national and non-national residents or those with different cultural origins can have an incidence on social solidarity and the exercise of citizenship.

Considering the diversity of experiences at school brought to our attention, notably by Qribi (2016), it would be useful to analyse the schooling of young people originating from post-colonial immigration in France according to different methodological and theoretical perspectives and by listening to different partners in the educational enterprise.

6 Conclusion

Among the five countries that we have dealt with in the second part of this book, it is in France that intercultural approaches seem the most disputed or even rejected. In the name of a sometimes-sacred laicity and a neutrality—forgetting that the French State finances Catholic schools generously—and a fear of Muslim communitarianism (which would have been the result of applying Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism), educational policies in France hesitate to recognize cultural and linguistic differences openly. It is in this way and on several occasions that the expression “indifference to difference” has been used to describe the French education system’s attitude towards cultural affiliations. As we will see in the chapter on religion, the French system sometimes seems little receptive (even though it can be nuanced in some ways) towards the issues of identity affiliations which, despite their importance in society, are largely designated as private affairs and do not concern in any way the State framework into which the school fits.

Besides, this indifference to difference has been called into question by recent research on inequalities in the school. The French education system is no longer indifferent, but seems to direct its activities in favour of pupils who are already in possession of a cultural capital enabling them to access numerous educational opportunities. Inequality is growing, socio-spatial segregation is becoming a fixture (CNESCO, 2016) and the pupils with migrant origins often suffer (due to their socio-economic status) in these unfavourable conditions.