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pupils and working-class immigrant pupils-recent studies have shown that
immigrant pupils are doing better. When we compare the French situation
to other nearby countries, for instance England, immigrant pupils seem to
fare a bit better in the French system.
Research also shows, and this is open to interpretation, that the schools
still manage to assimilate pupils. Second- and third-generation immigrant
pupils have very similar cultural habits, political opinions, and practices as
French ones. Other indicators of assimilation are the absence of ethnic
cliques or gangs, even in residential areas and school settings where there is
ethnic segregation. Recent studies of friendship among children show that
these friendships are not developed on an ethnic or national basis but are
characterized by a relatively high amount of inter-group interaction. In
that sense one could say that the Republican model is still working,
whether seen as a good or a bad thing.
There are some other factors showing that the model is not working too
well and might need to adapt to the present situation. For instance, on equal–
ity. Although immigrant children seem to be doing a bit better than French
ones, most of them belong to the working class, which means that there is
still a lot of inequality in the level of schooling. Efforts have been made to
respond to these problems since 1980 with the development, for instance, of
"Educational Priority Areas" very similar to the British Educational Priority
Areas, which were not explicitly designed to deal with the problem of immi–
grants. That's still a taboo question. But they did address those problems
because they occurred in areas where a majority of pupils came from immi–
grant groups. Now, there are enormous debates concerning the extent to
which the system should adapt to different populations, including immi–
grants, or should remain the same.
Another important dimension that has received a lot of international
attention concerns the transmission of values in the schools. This refers to
yesterday's debates about the introduction of relativism into the school
curriculum. France has not been different from the United States or
Britain in the way we teach the French Revolution when, for instance, in
the secondary schools, offering five or six different interpretations about
the meaning of the French Revolution. This is true for many other sub–
jects as well. But this relativism encounters different school populations
that were not previously in the elite school system and now are part of the
mass secondary schooling.
These facts have put into question the values the schools should teach.
One difficulty is in defining the civic values. For instance, the
hijeb,
or
headscarves, create conflict in French schools. Some years ago, we had an
enormous debate about it. In the traditional French Republican model,
Muslim girls who insist on wearing scarves should be excluded from
