“Our elites are disinterested in the education of the children of the people”

The scale of the scandal of sexual violence against very young children in the after-school sector hits us to the guts. How could abuses of such magnitude have taken place, sometimes repeatedly, without institutional reaction? How did those responsible for these public services allow such monstrous inhumanity to occur?

The same goes for our public school. However, we are perfectly informed of the situation: millions of children no longer really know how to read, have an appallingly poor vocabulary, no longer master the French language and are devoid of rigor and capacity for prolonged effort. At school they are too often exposed to harassment… Mental health problems are exploding. We can even speak of a form of demoralization of youth.

Résignation générale

We can’t say we didn’t know. The facts are before our eyes, officially established. Are we going to demonstrate in the streets to demand, all the time, an emergency rescue plan for children in danger? No, our childhood is mistreated in France, we know it, and we have not yet taken any major collective action to stop this tragedy. And yet I have not addressed the scandal of Social Assistance to Children (ASE), which is “Into the abyss”, according to the very terms of a report from the National Assembly. So why are our youth no longer our national priority?

There is at least one reason for this general resignation: it is the secession of our so-called elites or, to be more precise, of the ruling castes. They have sheltered their own children and no longer feel a community of destiny or solidarity with the children who are welcomed in public schools and after-school programs or even less by the ASE. They are too busy deploying specific strategies for the benefit of their own children. There has been a lot of talk about the risks of communitarian or Islamist secession, particularly since the August 2021 so-called anti-separatism law. But who talks about the cold and silent secession of the elites and its consequences?

The latter have deserted public schools in favor of more efficient alternative offers: free schools (under or outside of contract) without counting the time of schooling in Anglo-Saxon boarding schools which is increasingly long and early. The CSP+ categories therefore voted with their feet. And basically, they cope very well with successive governments organizing the shortage of places in private schools under contract, by perpetuating a political custom confining since 1984 the share of schools under contract to a maximum of 20% of public education.

These pseudo-elites do not seek to provide wider access to free schools for working-class children, even though more than 60% of French parents would like to entrust their children to these schools. What could be more undemocratic than denying citizens the basic right to choose the school of their own children?

Duty of solidarity

The political class agrees to prevent families from moving from public schools to private schools, as if there were some moral superiority in sending children to one system rather than another. The fact that public schools are dysfunctional today more than private schools does not stop them. The fact that they themselves have cautiously withdrawn their own children from public schools does not encourage them to remain silent.

The separate education of the children of the elites is as old as time, but their disinterest in the education of the children of the people and immigration is new. They allow themselves to do so because their patriotism and their faith have faded and they no longer necessarily envisage a French destiny for themselves and especially their children. They therefore favor bilingual or international schools and professions which encourage future expatriations, starting with finance professions.

The elites of yesteryear felt a duty of solidarity towards the people, if only for self-interested reasons: they had to be able to work productively, in a harmonious social climate. Today, the elites rely just as much on immigrants, relocation or on AI to run the production tool. If they can expatriate, replace French workers with other workers here or elsewhere, financialize their capital and basically move according to opportunities, what does the education of children from the French working classes and immigrants matter?

When they knew that they would have to deal with the people throughout their lives, they invested in their education and well-being. This gave rise to social paternalism in particular. They had a solidarity of destiny, even if they did not have equality of condition. So, once again, today, it is up to the people to push the elites to virtue, through the ballot box, and in the streets. The future of children must finally become our collective priority. We have a little over a year to impose it on the debate agenda for the presidential election.