Historian, member of the council of wise men of secularism and director of the education observatory at the Jean-Jaurès foundation, Iannis Roder has been teaching for more than 20 years in college in Seine-Saint-Denis.
While a teacher was beheaded this Friday near a college in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, he was one of the first teachers to sound the alarm on the challenge to republican values and the breakthrough of Muslim fundamentalism in schools in the early 2000s.
Is it a bomb, which exploded this Friday evening in front of the French school?
IANNIS RODER.
It is above all a bomb that explodes at the head of those who always minimize what is happening in National Education.
What will it take for them to finally achieve?
We have a terrible, dramatic demonstration of the extremes some are willing to go to.
What I have observed for years is that the Republic's protests are real.
Is the struggle of the school institution against fundamentalism ineffective?
We have learned to counter disputes, to curb them.
When there are protests against the Republic, the school has been much better equipped in recent years, with trained and dedicated teams, referents in each academy.
But I also have the impression that there is an acceptance of the fact that school is a place where we cannot say everything: we listen to the teacher but we think none the less.
This concerns a minimal part of the pupils in France.
But it is a terrible problem, because how can the school curb radical Islamism, in particular, if it does not express itself?
As long as there is no expression of this protest, it is very difficult to work on it.
Is it impossible to devote a course to freedom of expression in a suburban college, with the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, at this time of the beginning of the year and in the midst of the 2015 attacks?
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Why should we refrain from doing it?
You can teach everything as long as things are very well prepared.
You have to be intellectually and scientifically very equipped, and have the class well in hand and the complete confidence of your students to get started on these questions.
What resonance will this assassination have in National Education?
The first consequence will be the terrible dismay of teachers whose job is precisely to open young people to the world.
To be assassinated when you leave your workplace, because of your work, because you were working for a better understanding in society, is the victory of hatred.
And one of the results, I fear but fully understand it, will also be self-censorship that will take hold in the teaching world, as it has taken hold in the press after the attack on Charlie Hebdo.
Is this a turning point for the school?
Yes, I think it's a break in the history of the school.
The school of the Republic is the emancipatory school.
To kill a teacher is to kill this desire to open children to the world.
At the symbol level, there is nothing worse than attacking a professor.