To great ills, great remedies. In any case, this is what Gabriel Attal intends to do to fight against school bullying, a real battleground for the Minister of Education. Guest in the show Sunday Focus on RTL, Sunday December 17, 2023, he returned to empathy courses, a strong measure that he had proposed earlier from September 2023as part of its plan to combat school bullying. He notably specified that from January 2024, “1,000 schools” will experiment with these new course modules, before generalizing the model to “all primary schools in France from September 2024”. The minister reminded Mohamed Bouhafsi that he had been inspired by the best. “It’s true that on harassment, as on many subjects, I think it’s good to look at how it happens abroad, where it works, and to do the same. There is a country in Europe which really succeeded in reducing harassment, it’s Denmark. I went to their house to see how they do it“.
Courses dedicated to learning “tolerance and kindness”
Empathy courses will soon appear in French schools. But what will this look like? “Times when we learn to respect the difference of others, to a culture of appeasement when there are conflicts, to sometimes manage the fact that we are angry, to pacify things at school“, explained the Minister of National Education. Millions of students will be affected “from kindergarten”. The one who had himself been harassed when he was younger, therefore chose to make things happen. He explained that, from the start of the 2024 school year, several organizations will be tested in all primary schools in France as part of this experiment. “In some schools it will be one hour, in others it will be two hours a week”did he declare. “These times dedicated to learning about difference, tolerance, kindness and otherness”, have emerged as one of the most effective ways to counter the devastating effects of school bullying. In recent months, several suicides have aroused the indignation of the political class. In September 2023, for example, Gabriel Attal publicly denounced the behavior of a Versailles rectorate following the suicide of a student a few days earlier.