Pap Ndiaye, an isolated minister in the battle for social and educational diversity

The Minister of National Education, Pap Ndiaye, and Emmanuel Macron (from the back), in the courtyard of the Louise-Michel college, in Ganges (Hérault), April 20, 2023.

Pap Ndiaye was thinking of leaving the club of “invisible” ministers to which he has been igned since his appointment to national education. Thursday, May 11, the former director of the Palais de la Porte Dorée (and therefore of the Museum of the History of Immigration) was to unveil a vast mixed plan, to promote school and social mixing by involving private establishments. But this project, potentially explosive and postponed since January, has gradually deflated. “We have some difficulties, it is clear that the headwinds are strong”admits the Minister, the day before, to the World. “A part of the right would like to portray me as someone who would like to relaunch the debate on “free school”, by making me a new Alain Savary [ministre de l’éducation nationale sous le gouvernement Mauroy en 1984]. I do not put myself in his footsteps, even if I have a lot of admiration for the former minister and the resistant, unjustly forgotten “observes the historian.

To put out the nascent fire, the shot was split into two sequences. On May 11, Pap Ndiaye will only address public schools. He should discuss the fate of private schools under contract on May 17, insisting on the absence of constraints. “I know of few wars that have been fought when both sides agreed”, he shouts. In reality, the minister is procrastinating, at the request of Emmanuel Macron who found that “it didn’t come out right”. In Le Figaro of April 13, he rejects the term quota while wishing, on the part of private establishments under contract – 75% financed by the State – “a commitment to move towards more social and educational diversity” with “percentages”. The room for maneuver is mainly in the public, he immediately specified, as he does on every occasion, now.

Pap Ndiaye knew he would clash with the right and the far right, who have not stopped sharpening their knives since entering politics. The mere mention of the mixed plan has revived, within the Les Républicains (LR) party, the specter of the “school war” of 1984, where the private sector would be threatened with losing its autonomy and its funding. “Mixing is inefficientclaims the leader of the LR senators, Bruno Retailleau. He must first solve the problems of the republican school, which has become a machine for reproducing inequalities. It is imbued with a lounge wokism. » An indictment sung in chorus on the right, where we oppose the normalien author of The Black Condition to his predecessor Jean-Michel Blanquer, former conservative rector, on the grounds that he would not defend secularism enough. “He is an apostle of the woke cause”stings Olivier Marleix, boss of LR deputies.

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