EDITORIAL. The assassination of a teacher in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, one more trauma for the teaching community

Even if the circumstances and the motivations which led to this crime have nothing to do, this drama awakens the still fresh memory of the assassination of Samuel Paty, victim of an Islamist attack. This is the second time in two and a half years that a teacher has been killed, in class or on leaving his establishment. The trauma within the National Education is deep.

This is further proof that the school is definitely no longer a sanctuary sheltered from the din of society. Violence has entered in many forms, and it can therefore lead to the death of teachers or students near and sometimes within a school. Worse still, not only is the school no longer protected, spared, but the teachers find themselves on the front line, often lonely in the face of certain disruptions in our societies. They are asked to make up for the shortcomings of other institutions, starting with the family. Within the family unit, respect for authority has dissolved, transmission between generations works less well, and teachers are asked to remedy these shortcomings.

Teachers do not feel sufficiently recognized

They sometimes feel abandoned in the face of the rise in violence, the ravages of addiction to screens, or even in the face of the danger of community withdrawal. The teacher was a hussar, he is now only a rampart, a last rampart facing the dislocation of what the essayist Jérôme Fourquet calls “the French archipelago”.

For twenty years, the State has been inflicting more and more tasks on teachers and granting them less and less recognition, which has resulted in a deep crisis of vocations. Minister Pap Ndiaye has indeed taken emergency initiatives to open up more places for competitions, to perpetuate the situation of temporary workers or to increase salaries, an imperative which must materialize in mid-March. But beyond that, it is a whole ambitious discourse that the State must hold in the long term to rehabilitate the image of the teacher, exalt his missions and put him back where he should be: at the very top of the social ladder. .