With A school in shock? The teaching world after the murder of Samuel Paty (Le Bord de l’eau, 144 pages, 14 euros), Ismaïl Ferhat, university professor in Paris-Nanterre, and Sébastien Ledoux, professor at the Picardy Jules-Verne University, present the results of their research work on the way in that Teachers mobilized after the attack against high school history and geography teacher Samuel Paty, on October 16, 2020. Their reactions are diverse but focused on educational action with students.
Through your two surveys, qualitative and quantitative, you demonstrate that the teaching world mobilized strongly to take responsibility within the classes for the attack against Samuel Paty and explain it to the students, absorbing this shock themselves. Isn’t this something specific to teachers when faced with attacks: having to react as a teacher?
Sébastien Ledoux: In fact, teachers are caught in a double problem between emotion and educational action. With this attack it is still the first time that they have had to manage an event that affects them so frontally. The reflection, although this drama shocks and upsets them, is nevertheless to say to themselves: how am I going to face this drama with my students?
He speaks of a “pedagogization” of the attack. What does this mean?
SL: Teachers have been subjected, since 2015 and the attack against charlie hebdowith the order to integrate the management of the attack into the school space, organizing in particular a minute of silence. The Ministry of Education asks teachers to unite to form a nation and respond to the attack, even if that means standardizing everything. But each teacher will choose whether or not to work on the event in class, to turn it into an educational act. The explanation of attacks on secularism or protests against the minute of silence thus masks the pedagogical response of teachers.
Ismail Ferhat: Since the 1980s, there has been a phenomenon of transferring social issues to school, in France as in all Western countries. The school must provide solutions. We must educate in defense, road safety, sexuality, equality between girls and boys, republican values… In the education code, in twenty years we have gone from seven to seventeen objectives assigned to the educational system. The educational responses provided after the murder of Samuel Paty are part of this phenomenon.
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