“I’ve always been optimistic, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing this job.”
It is with these words that Iannis Roder concluded his intervention, this Wednesday March 6, at the microphone of RTL.
Professor of History-Geography in Seine-Saint-Denis and director of the Observatory of Secularism at the Jean Jaurès Foundation, he was invited to speak while a principal was threatened with death at the Maurice Ravel high school, in the 20th arrondissement of the capital.
He had asked three students to remove their veil: one of them, an adult and a BTS student, had refused.
“
The school is a target for Islamists
,” he notably underlined.
Iannis Roder says he is
“not surprised”
by this story, even if according to him this type of situation
“remains rare”
.
“The first thing that comes to students’ mouths when we talk about secularism is a ban,”
he stressed
.
It should be freedom.”
The teacher, who today publishes
Preserving Secularism
, published by the Observatory, however, evokes a
“heavy atmosphere”
in teaching, with teachers and principals sometimes being forced to
“police in the face of students who sometimes come provoke, look for faults
.
“What is striking is that it gets out of control extremely quickly”
with social networks leading to
“death threats”
.
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“As long as the school and the republic are straight in their boots, it works”
The professor assures him, after the assassination of Dominique Bernard,
“we are learning lessons from what happened”
.
The challenge, for
“teachers”
and
“management staff”
is to
“reiterate how secularism is a foundation that allows us to experience social peace”
.
Iannis Roder then took up the example of threats against the principal of the Maurice Ravel high school:
“When secularism no longer applies, there is a confrontation.”
20 years after the 2005 law against wearing the veil at school, the teacher assures that everything
“worked very well until two years ago”
, with the arrival of
“abayas, new outfits, which they wanted us to believe were not religious, when they were pushed by Islamist militants
.
It was enough to remember that these outfits were prohibited,
“Gabriel Attal did it”
.
“As long as the school and the republic are straight in their boots, it works.”
“Gilles Kepel, Bernard Rougier and Hugo Micheron say that the school is a target for Islamists
,” he stressed.
“
The French school of the Republic opens minds, it allows access to autonomy for everyone, it allows emancipation”
, while the Islamists “
do not want emancipation for the young people they see like Muslims
” whom they want to “
keep (...) in this rigorist Islam
”.
The school
“creates commonality, regardless of belief”
, while
“the Islamists try to separate”,
he insisted.