“Shouldn’t education, rather than a reserved domain, be an area to be protected from executive intervention? »

2023-09-12 06:00:05

This article appears in “Le Monde de l’Éducation”. If you are subscribed to Mondeyou can subscribe to this weekly letter by following this link.

Compared to his predecessors, the current President of the Republic shows a greater taste for school issues, to the point of having expressly included them in his “reserved domain”. Constitutionalists will not fail to be surprised, because this notion of “reserved domain”stated by Jacques Chaban-Delmas in 1959, designates a usage which only applies in areas where the Constitution, in its article 5, recognizes very important powers to the president, by making it “the guarantor of national independence, territorial integrity and respect for treaties”. Concerned about reading and commenting on what he calls the “great texts”Emmanuel Macron would be well advised to include the Constitution.

Apart from the fact that it is not up to any public authority to ” to book “, of its own accord, this or that area of ​​public action, seeing the school enter this field raises other questions of a different nature. Indeed, if education is indeed an important area of ​​public action in France, where a government, with a minister responsible for this portfolio, exercises its power according to various legal forms, it is also and above all the institution which deals the dissemination of knowledge on a large scale. However, it is nowhere said that knowledge must depend on political power, even if it is the minister, within various consultations, who traditionally, in the infinity of human knowledge, “arrests” those who are supposed to be taught at school.

Values ​​​​in danger

In this area as in others, we do not think that we can legislate on such questions without having an idea of ​​what is happening in the world, in the hundreds of “education systems” in practice in all countries. However, teaching content, which was often respected by political powers out of loyalty to established traditions, except in extreme cases of dictatorships, is today severely abused: extension of dictatorial regimes, new favoring of nationalist, warmongering or racist discourses. in many countries, refusal of many countries, including among the most prominent in the “liberal” camp, to give the truths shared in the scientific community other than as alternative theories, on par with others which endorse various discourses , particularly under religious influence.

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