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Schools are inextricably at the heart of France’s own brand of culture wars-something Ndiaye showed an awareness of in his remarks at the handover ceremony in front of the education ministry. GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT/AFP via Getty Images
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Two years prior, schoolteacher Samuel Paty was beheaded by an extremist as he left the school premises after showing his class cartoons of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed. Ndiaye visits Collège du Bois d’Aulne in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, France, on May 23. import -like Coca-Cola, only with the risk not to the consumer’s waistline but to the national psyche, which they say will be debilitated by American-style culture wars. Critics view an emphasis on racial matters as a nefarious U.S. It’s the nexus of America and race that has some French commentators fulminating. race relations in the French media following incendiary events such as the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 and the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Ndiaye has used his subject matter expertise to interpret U.S.
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Blanquer focused on the teaching of basic skills and introduced free breakfasts for children in poor neighborhoods he may be best known today for a group he co-founded dedicated to French republican principles like secularism and humanism and critical of what they perceive as the contagion of “woke” ideas from American campuses. Ndiaye represented a sharp U-turn from Jean-Michel Blanquer, France’s longest-serving education minister, who occupied that role throughout Macron’s first five-year term. Macron’s pick for a new education minister was a surprise. Pap Ndiaye, a 56-year-old history professor specializing in American politics, looks the very model of a soft-spoken academic in tortoiseshell horn-rimmed glasses. The man at the center of the maelstrom, France’s new education minister, cut a low-key figure when he took up his first cabinet post later that day. But in a country that prides itself on being officially colorblind-to the extent that the government keeps no statistics on the racial or ethnic makeup of its population-this fact was omitted even in press coverage of his critics, who fretted that he would fling wide the doors of French classrooms to American-style “ wokisme.” (That word resonates with some French parents and politicians the same way “critical race theory” does with some Americans.) A similar historical milestone in the United States would have been prominently noted in articles about his sudden rise in politics. Ndiaye is the first Black education minister of France.
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For one moment, before being eclipsed by a heated parliamentary election, this was the political chatter in France.
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One of the names fell like a bomb, sparking a torrent of commentary by parents, teachers, students, and trolls. Under a cloudy sky matching the slate rooftops of Paris, the secretary-general of the Élysée, France’s presidential palace, recited the names of President Emmanuel Macron’s new cabinet in May.
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