The teaching world is in turmoil and the deep malaise. It is a particularly delicate baptism of fire. The new minister is expected at the turn by the teacher unions. But through Pap Ndiaye, it is in fact Emmanuel Macron himself who plays big. Because a government is a bit like a class. There are students who are more or less good, more or less wise, hecklers, dunces and then there is necessarily a darling. The one that the teacher smolders with attention because he hopes for it expects a lot. And Emmanuel Macron’s favorite minister is Pap Ndiaye. It was the head of state who personally chose this historian to set him up on rue de Grenelle, a bet as much as a symbol.
Last week, Emmanuel Macron even spoke on the eve of the minister’s back-to-school press conference, which is quite unusual. Before the rectors of the academy gathered at the Sorbonne, Emmanuel Macron himself explained the new method, the “Cultural Revolution” that it intends to implement in National Education. A method, made of flexibility and experimentation, inaugurated in Marseille. In June, it was also the place of the first trip of Pap Ndiaye, in the wake of the head of state. We remember the images, of this silent minister, and discreet, very discreet, always two steps behind Emmanuel Macron as often very talkative. And, a sign of the attention that the Head of State pays him, the Elysée has closely watched the composition of the minister’s cabinet to place real professionals from the world of school there.
Pap Ndiaye is not a politician, he is not experienced in parliamentary contests and media controversies. Barely named, he was covered with jeers by part of the right and by the far right who caricatured him as an anti-republican communitarian. Emmanuel Macron relies on the consensual temperament and caution to appease the climate around the school. And to reconcile him with the teachers.
But he also remembers that his ex-darling, Jean-Michel Blanquer, long in court at the Elysée, had a successful debut with a fanfare. Before being carried away by a succession of these controversies of which the school, this symbolic high place of our Republic, is so often the cauldron.