France is facing an on-going crisis in which young people, as young as 12 to 14, go out at night burning cars, businesses, schools, etc. in their own areas. The trouble has seemingly spread to Germany and Belgium, where comparable situations exist amongst young citizens “from immigration”– a growing crisis over the past 40 years.

One measure of the de Villepin government aims at “giving a chance in life” to these young people, who feel the hopelessness of discrimination, poor lodgings and chronic unemployment (up to 50% in some Paris suburbs, while the national average is about 9%). To give such a chance to these mostly academic underachievers, one proposed measure is to “reduce the minimum age for apprenticeship from 16 to14”. What are the pros and cons of this measure?

It would allow those aged 13 who have given up on school, who (like some of our CPE failures) can neither read nor write, to be kept occupied at learning a trade, which will enable them to earn a living as plumber, painter, construction worker, sweeper, where job opportunities exist since the mainstream youth of France do not wish to go into such jobs. Keep them off the streets and give them hope for the future, however modest and limited in scope that is.

On the negative side, a child of 13 has not yet acquired the minimum basic education necessary for life and living in this modern world, whether in France or here. By curtailing his/her general education for apprenticeship one is curtailing most of his/her chance of joining the economic/cultural/ ruling elite. Worse, the message could be interpreted as: “You are only good enough to do what your parents came to France to do, i.e. sweep the streets.” As an editorialist with USA Today said: “La belle France: A country of equality and exclusion”. Excellent educational experiments such as the zones d’éducation prioritaire or ZEP (promptly imported into Mauritius, where similar exclusion exists) did offer additional support to young people from these areas, but, alas, at the same time, created more exclusion: typically from employers who quietly avoided recruiting ex-ZEP youths. It was not minister Sarkozy who invented the derogatory term of “la racaille”, it’s of common usage in France to describe undesirable people.

Back to our analysis of education as the root cause of the crisis : France has ignored one basic rule of good governance in managing educational systems, which can best be explained by this quote from Loraine Monroe: “What is good for the best is good for the rest.” Dr Monroe took one of the worst schools in the worst district of Harlem, New York and with care, love and professionalism transformed it into one of the top schools of USA with over 90% of kids going on to university. There is no way, in today’s France, despite some extraordinary exceptions, that a child going to school in let’s say Clichy-sous-Bois (Mauritians read Roche-Bois) gets the same opportunities as one attending Lycée Henri IV or that an ado undergoing apprenticeship for a CAP (Certificat d’aptitude professionnelle) will have the same chance as one who reads engineering or gestion in one of the prestigious “Grandes écoles”.

Culture withheld is culture lost, only culture shared is living culture. So France can surely save itself by sharing, through education, its immense and immensely rich culture with all its citizens.

<B>Dr. Michael ATCHIA</B>