2023-07-20 21:14:29
Handover of powers at the Ministry of National Education between Pap Ndiaye and Gabriel Attal, in Paris, July 20, 2023. CYRIL BITTON FOR “THE WORLD”
Emmanuel Macron had made it a symbol, but the symbol has lived. Pap Ndiaye is no longer Minister of National Education, fourteen months after taking office, on May 20, 2022. By choosing a leftist, historian specializing in minorities and author of The Black Condition (Calmann-Lévy, 2008), Emmanuel Macron had wanted to decide with Jean-Michel Blanquer, also from civil society, but a fine connoisseur of the national education house and who had become a politician during his visit to Rue de Grenelle.
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On his appointment, the change of style was welcomed as beneficial by the teaching staff, overwhelmed by five years of management experienced as arbitrary. Unlike his predecessor, who welcomed the unions in 2017 with a thunderous “I’ll get you all okay”, Pap Ndiaye honestly warns the representative bodies that disagreements will inevitably arise. Unions appreciate.
“The appeasement has partly worked. In the teachers’ rooms, the teachers are less tense around the personality of the minister”remarks Jérôme Fournier, of the SE-UNSA. “Pap Ndiaye has a very gentle style, very attentivenotes Pierre Mathiot, director of Sciences Po Lille and architect of the reform of the high school and the baccalaureate under the previous term of office. He was seen as a left-wing personality, and that appealed to the teachers. But these points in advance were quickly lost. »
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The symbol of a black man at the head of a large ministry, like his research subjects, immediately irritates the far right and part of the right. As soon as she took office on May 20, 2022, Marine Le Pen attacked her head-on. “The appointment of Pap Ndiaye, an assumed indigenist, to national education is the last stone in the deconstruction of our country, its values and its future”, asserts the president of the National Rally (RN). Since then, the Minister of Education has remained under the constant fire of attacks.
Plunged into the big bath
For this intellectual, the exercise of power is quickly a test. “National education is not governed by symbols”, we warn in educational spheres. Pap Ndiaye is a newcomer, both in the mysteries of governmental and parliamentary life and in the cogs of the national education machine, immersed in the deep end of a highly technical ministry. Some of those he receives upon his arrival mock his ignorance of the system. To make matters worse, the roadmap set by Emmanuel Macron includes sensitive and complex issues, such as the upgrading of teachers.
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