A simple email to confirm a departure. Friday March 22, the principal of the Maurice-Ravel establishment in Paris announced that he was leaving his position “for safety for me and for the establishment”, he explained. An email which follows an altercation between him and a student at the end of February who refused to remove her veil at the heart of the school sign, as required by the 2004 law.
“An inglorious episode” for the Republic
The latter claims to have been assaulted. The student filed a complaint, but it was dismissed because the offense “was not sufficiently characterized”, specifies the prosecution. For his part, the principal and the rectorate denied any violence against the young girl. But a wave of harassment and death threats against the director of the establishment overcame his desire to stay in office until his retirement, scheduled in a few months.
Invited this Thursday on the set of La Grande interview Europe 1-CNews, Jean-Pierre Obin, former inspector of National Education, believes that this new episode is another victory for the Islamists. “For the Islamists, it is a victory and they will savor it as such,” he assures Sonia Mabrouk at the microphone. “That a young girl, by the act and the simple fact of provoking a principal, succeeds in making him resign from his position, the principal is for them a certain victory and for the Republic an inglorious episode,” he continues.
Self-censorship
“That we failed to retain this principal, to protect him and to ensure that in this confrontation which had been provoked, which was wanted, it was not the school which won, the Republic which wins, but his opponents, it is still something that we can call a capitulation, in any case a defeat”.
The author of the book “Teachers are afraid”, published by the Observatory, warns of the increase in teachers who self-censor in class. And, “contrary to popular belief, it is not on subjects specific to disciplines that there is the most self-censorship, but on subjects which deal with values. Such as the teaching of freedom of expression, the teaching of secularism, teaching the fight against homophobia or anti-Semitism, or even girl-boy equality,” he concludes.