A French Education Minister Who Knows Immigrants’ Struggles
By Aida Alami
PARIS — IN late January, shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem sat in her office lined with gold leaf in the 18th-century Hôtel de Rothelin-Charolais, reflecting on the identity crisis among young French Muslims.
“When
these young people feel frustrated with school, they look for an
identity elsewhere and put forward their religious identity,” said the
36-year-old Moroccan immigrant, the first female education minister in France. “It is not surprising that they are impervious to republican values.”
Ms. Vallaud-Belkacem has for some time been considered one of the rising stars of the country’s governing Socialist Party. Today, as France looks to its schools to help heal religious and racial divisions, she is under pressure to prove that her lofty status is deserved.
She would certainly seem to be better qualified than most French
ministers to reach out to alienated young people, having spent her early
years and many summers speaking Berber on her grandparents’ farm in
northern Morocco and growing up poor in France.
Yet
Ms. Vallaud-Belkacem refuses to admit that her origins distinguish her
from other politicians. She gratefully owes her success, she insists, to
the French education system.
“School
was always a major player in my personal journey,” said Ms.
Vallaud-Belkacem. “It allowed me to open up to the world, and also
social mobility. It allowed me to enrich myself, to read, learn and
understand.”
AS
President François Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls seek to
build up France’s intelligence capabilities and expand police powers in a
nationwide crackdown on terrorism, Ms. Vallaud-Belkacem has been given
the task of building bridges to the millions of alienated young Muslims
in France, some of whom refused to participate in a nationwide minute of
silence in memory of the victims of the Charlie Hebdo attacks.
On Jan. 22, Ms. Vallaud-Belkacem announced a 250 million euro, or $285
million, plan to train educators in discussing racism and transmitting
French values of “vivre ensemble,” or living together, in the classroom.
“It is not just family that must transmit values, but school also,” Ms. Vallaud-Belkacem said.
As
France reeled from the Charlie Hebdo attacks, reports of young Muslim
students refusing to honor the dead highlighted the depth of the
divisions in French society.
Those
divisions have been well known for years. A 2012 study by the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that France
leads Europe in educational inequalities stemming from social and ethnic
origins. France’s National Council for the Evaluation of the School
System has spoken of “school ghettos,” referring to districts where
dropout rates are high and performances exceptionally weak.
Ms.
Vallaud-Belkacem said that she, too, could have grown up angry and
disaffected, having been raised in poverty and lived on the excluded
side of French society.
She
said she has fond memories of her childhood in Beni Shiker, a mountain
village in Morocco where she says she tended goats and saw perhaps one
car a month. Her father worked construction in France, and she and her
mother and older sister joined him when she was 4 years old. Her five
other siblings were born in France.
Ms.
Vallaud-Belkacem grew up in a poor neighborhood of Abbeville, a town in
northern France, and then in the city of Amiens. In her family, men and
women had traditional roles: The men worked, the women looked after the
children. Her mother nevertheless pushed the seven children to study
and encouraged the girls to be financially independent.
Ms.
Vallaud-Belkacem’s father was strict; she was not allowed to date.
Books became her escape, the lack of leisure activities providing a
chance to excel at school. She attended law school, then the prestigious
Paris Institute of Political Studies — a training ground for the French
political elite — where she met her husband, Boris Vallaud, a confidant
of Mr. Hollande who is now deputy chief of staff at the Élysée Palace.
The
elections of 2002 were a turning point for her. Her family was never
interested in politics. She got the bug that year when the far-right
National Front’s presidential candidate won enough votes to enter the
runoff. She joined the Socialist Party in the hope of making a
difference.
“I
was very shy and reserved, so it was a bit contradictory to get into
politics,” she said. “I decided to make a lifetime commitment against
social injustices, against inequalities, and that is why I am profoundly
from the left.”
SHE
rapidly climbed the political ladder. From 2004 to 2008, she was in
charge of cultural policy in the Rhône-Alpes Region. Through 2013 she
was a city councilor in Lyon. In 2007, she was spokeswoman for the
Socialist Party’s presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal, who lost the
election to Nicolas Sarkozy. When Mr. Hollande ran for president in
2012, he appointed Ms. Vallaud-Belkacem his campaign spokeswoman.
After
Mr. Hollande’s election victory, he appointed her minister of women’s
rights and chief government spokeswoman. Last year, she was named youth
and sports minister and rose to education minister in August, a
prestigious position held by monumental figures like Jules Ferry, who in the 1880s wrested control of French schooling from the Roman Catholic Church.
Not
everyone welcomed her meteoric rise. Muslims in France have criticized
her for supporting French secularism to the detriment of Islam. She
denies that, of course, and says she loosened restrictions on Muslim
mothers wearing head scarves during school activities, like field trips.
Part
of the conservative press also savaged her, calling her “Ayatollah,”
describing her appointment as a “provocation” and predicting that she
would Islamicize French schools. Her reaction was to secure the passage
of laws that reflect the secular liberalism of the Socialist Party,
including bans on sexual harassment and measures to promote gender
equality.
When
it comes to the French education system, she makes her loyalty to it
clear. French schools will instill the values of the French republic in
students, she said. They can do so, however, while acknowledging the
experiences of Muslim students whose first inclination is to reject
those values. Making a difference, she said, starts with reaching out to
those students and recognizing their diversity.
“Endless
political debates have stigmatized Muslim families,” she said. “School
needs to teach people that everyone is part of one community and that we
are all free and equal.”
While
she acknowledges that her path is unusual for an immigrant in France,
she encourages other children of immigration to dream.
“It
is O.K. to fail as long as you try,” she said. “My mother used to
always tell me, ‘Don’t worry, life has more imagination than you.’”
A version of this article appears in print on February 21, 2015, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: A French Education Minister Who Knows Immigrants’ Struggles. Click here to read on the website
