Emmanuel Macron superminister of education? The Head of State multiplies announcements and trips. On the eve of the start of the school year, the Head of State even made it his “reserved domain”, as did Foreign Affairs and Defense, faithful to a very Gaullist reading of the institutions of the Fifth Republic.
On Friday, he will be on the front line again, this time on the front line of the vocational school, the poor relation of which he promises to make a “sector of excellence”, during a trip to Vaucluse. At the end of June, he suggested from Marseilles the later closing of colleges in sensitive neighborhoods to fight against delinquency.
On August 23, he proclaimed the early start of the school year for students in difficulty, the overhaul of history programs and a new baccalaureate calendar. “Why am I talking so much about school?” Because it is the heart of the battle that we must wage, because it is from there that we will rebuild France, ”he insists after the urban violence which shook the country at the end of June.
Meanwhile, Gabriel Attal, rising star of the macronie, succeeded at the head of the ministry to the discreet Pap Ndiaye, considered too little political for such a priority subject. But the president remains just as omnipresent even if the new minister, a close friend of the first hour, struck hard upon his arrival by declaring war on the abaya.
“We have a real drift, a President of the Republic who crushes (everything) and who takes the place of the government”, deplores Gilles Langlois, national secretary of SE-Unsa.
Emmanuel Macron, trained with the Jesuits of La Providence in Amiens, also intends to overhaul the school programs of history and civic education, with a more “chronological” teaching and the reading each week of a “great fundamental text on our values “.
So many statements that go wrong. “We wouldn’t ask a president to tell a surgeon how to operate on appendicitis,” says Guislaine David, head of FSU-Snuipp, the first union for kindergarten and elementary school. “The school lives to the political rhythm while education needs a long time” and “serenity”, she regrets.
At the Élysée, we note on the contrary that Education is an area in which the French “expect a lot”, which all the more justifies the presidential investment. “But the head of state is not a superminister of education in the same way that, for 70 years, the ministers of foreign affairs and the armies have not been deputy ministers”, sweeps an adviser.
Some of his predecessors were also very present in the school, from General de Gaulle to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the true architect of the single college. The day after his election, Nicolas Sarkozy had meanwhile split a long letter to parents and teachers to expose his vision of the school.
“The novelty is that Emmanuel Macron claims loud and clear this reserved area and does not stop making announcements off the cuff,” observes Claude Lelièvre, education historian. Deprived of an absolute majority since his re-election, “he wants to occupy the field of speech, to show that he is always on the initiative”, he believes.
Gabriel Attal, experienced in communication, is a priori an asset. “But it shouldn’t be too much either, because Emmanuel Macron also exists through the magisterium of speech,” notes the historian. The president, who knows the subject intimately, did not even have an education adviser at the start of his first five-year term, notes Claude Lelièvre.
But her entourage swears it, Brigitte Macron, herself a teacher, is neither her adviser nor the bis Minister of Education that some believe to see in her. Even though she publicly took certain strong positions, such as the return of the uniform to school (“with a simple and not sad outfit”) or the banning of cell phones, including in high school. “We fantasized about his role. She never intervened or was consulted, ”says those around ex-minister Pap Ndiaye.
