“Transmit republican values ​​or quit the job”: the anger of teachers after the words of … – BFMTV

Jean-Michel Blanquer said on Tuesday that teachers should “adhere to the values ​​of the Republic and pass them on” or “leave” National Education. If, on the merits, the minister’s remarks are not debated among the representatives of the teachers, they denounce the tone and point to political ulterior motives.

The subject is not so much at the bottom of the subject but with the distrust that it expresses towards them. The teachers have not faded since this Tuesday, at the time of launching his training plan for teachers in secularism, Jean-Michel Blanquer posited that they had to “adhere to the values ​​of the Republic and transmit them” or ” quit the job “.

“If someone has a problem with the values ​​of the Republic, it may be possible democratically, as a French citizen, on the other hand it is not possible as an official of the Republic”, he continued. and adding, on a still martial register:

“It may not have been clear enough in the past, it will now be very clear in the present and in the future, through training and the management of people’s careers.”

This air of suspicion, this melody of “submit or resign” promptly aroused the indignation of trade unions.

“Insulting” words and “exasperating” method

Thus, the SNES-FSU drew its press release on Wednesday: “The suspicions and threatening remarks of the minister against teachers who do not transmit the values ​​of the Republic are not admissible! They are even unworthy of his function!”

“The FSU demands that Jean-Michel Blanquer publicly return to his remarks insulting the School and the staff who support it”, demands the text which poses beforehand: “The FSU reminds the minister that it is by acknowledging the officials their quality of citizen that they are allowed to bring to life and transmit the values ​​of the Republic “.

The SNES-FSU general secretary, Sophie Vénétitay, resumed this Thursday from BFMTV.com: “We are always present. We have held on, whether in the face of the health crisis or other dramatic situations, and holds a discourse of threats and permanent suspicion? It is a method which becomes exasperating “.

“It’s an attack on the entire profession”, storms Jules Siran, federal co-secretary at SUD Education, who continues:

“What is unbearable is the mistrust but also the generalized institutional mistreatment”.

Feeling of loneliness

The anger and distress of teachers are all the more painful as they are also a matter of timing. “A few days after the tribute to Samuel Paty, who defended these values ​​so strongly, the timing and the content were unwelcome,” said Jean-Rémi Girard, president of SNALC.

Frédéric Marchand, secretary general of UNSA Education, tells us:

“It was not nothing these commemorations, we felt emotions go up in some colleagues”.

And the reactions he has gathered from some of them show that Tuesday’s projection leaves them with an unpleasant feeling of isolation in the mouth: “I was told: ‘I am a history-geography teacher and everyday, it is already not easy to transmit these values ​​and if in addition we give the impression to public opinion that this is not what I do … “.

It is therefore not for the representative of the UNSA to serve a “republican catechism”, but to create a “collective dynamic” so as not to leave “the teacher alone in front of his class”.

“Make your ministry work!”

Ungrateful and stigmatizing. This is how the minister’s words appear in the ears of the teachers for whom he is responsible. Jean-Rémi Girard considers them still superfluous insofar as the rue de Grenelle has the hierarchical means to act if necessary, and that the responsibility falls to him:

“If questions arise at the individual level – I admit that we have not really noticed them – if the ministry has identified colleagues who oppose the values ​​of the Republic, a priori it is up to him to solve the problem and to sanction, so what we say to the minister is: ‘Make your ministry work!’ “.

A “personal” drift according to the unions

The litigation crystallizes around the personality of Jean-Michel Blanquer himself, of which Sophie Vénétitay points out to us the commitment “for a few months in an individual strategy to build a stature”.

The “Red Pens”, which highlight the daily difficulties of professors on Twitter, carried the pen in the same wound Wednesday:

“For the Red Pens, we have not been clear enough in the past. If you want to become Minister of National Education and you have a problem with the teachers, you choose another ministry. If you become a minister, you transmit the values ​​to the teachers (respect, support, pedagogical freedom, trust) .And if you do not transmit them and if you even militate against these values, eventually get out of this ministry, because you made a mistake (and deceived us by the same occasion). “

A hashtag in the air of a slogan has also flourished on the social network: #BlanquerDemission. The reuse, Rachid the instit, a teacher of schools with more than 65,000 subscribers, reacted:

“Imagine you get up every morning to plow a field, you have a guy who spends his life putting obstacles in the path of your plow and one day he puts pressure on you like ‘you know, if you’ are against the plowing of the earth, you are breaking ‘”.

The school already shaken up by the presidential election

And unions don’t seem to hope that the immediate future will heal the wounds. “We all understood that the presidential campaign had started,” notes Jean-Rémi Girard, president of SNALC. Campaign which he expects to be “long and painful”, “but we ask that we maintain respect for the staff of National Education.” Running through the analysis, Jean-Rémi Girard believes:

“It is obviously a moment of political communication to give pledges to a part of the electorate … but not to the teachers apparently”, he smiles with a little bitterness.

“Traditionally, during an election period, ministers tend to calm things down. There, we have a minister who is increasingly irrational in his way of expressing himself”, assures Jules Siran who wonders:

“What will the next step be?” “The rupture is consumed”, he slices in the wake.

Frédéric Marchand regrets this interrupted dialogue: “The number 1 problem of the school is not the one pointed out by the minister, it is fears, fears, situations difficult to manage on a daily basis”. “We are certainly at the end of the five-year term but there are still issues, subjects that must necessarily be addressed”, abounds Sophie Vénétitay who lists the lack of attractiveness of the profession of teacher, the preparation for the start of the 2022 school year and raises the question social: “Jean-Michel Blanquer made his statements the very day of a mobilization of the AESH (Supporters of students with disabilities, Editor’s note)”. “Many of them live below the poverty line,” she illustrates.