“The children in your care will not only have to write and decipher a letter, read a sign on a street corner, add and multiply.
They are French and they must know France, its geography and its history: its body and its soul.
They will be citizens and they must know what a free democracy is, what rights confers on them, what duties the sovereignty of the nation imposes on them.
This is how Jean Jaurès' letter to teachers begins, which will be read to all students on Monday, at 11 am, during the tribute to Samuel Paty, the beheaded teacher.
Undoubtedly less known than the “Discours à la jeunesse”, this succession of advice had already been recited at the Sorbonne ten days ago, in front of the coffin of the murdered professor, by his friend Christophe Capuano, lecturer in history in Lyon .
"It is quite appropriate in these circumstances, since it defends with force the republican principles that are trying to undermine fundamentalists and terrorists", judge Vincent Magne, who will make it discover, undoubtedly in its entirety, to a final year class, after contextualizing it.
"A very good choice"
This teacher in a large vocational school in Troyes (Aube), deputy secretary general of the Association of history and geography teachers, also welcomes the "very good choice" of the figure of Jean Jaurès.
"Jules Ferry, to whom we owe however compulsory education and moral and civic education, would have been a less good idea, because of his polemical positions on colonization", he believes.
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When Jean Jaurès, the former philosophy teacher, wrote this letter to his peers, taken up in the form of a column in 1888 in La Dépêche, the founder of the Socialist Party was only 29 years old.
“Its major future themes on the school question are already present: reading for all, an essential key to access to knowledge;
the freedom for teachers to build up their own intellectual baggage;
criticism of over-formatted teaching methods, ”comments Agnès Sandras, curator at the National Library of France, in a post.
“At the time, adds Vincent Magne, Jaurès was already part of the fight against the political power of the Church, its stranglehold on institutions.
For Jean-Luc Auduc, associate of history and president of the Ethics Committee of the Academy of Versailles, abounds: invoking this inveterate promoter of the secular school makes sense in the current context.
“Let us remember that he also fought a lot so that secular moral education, that is to say independent of any religious belief, could be added to instruction.
"