Paris, Feb 16, IRNA ,President Nicolas Sarkozy dropped an intellectual bombshell this week, surprising the nation and touching off waves of protest with his revision of the school curriculum.
He said after the opinion poll carried by Le Point indicated his popularity dropped that “every fifth grader will have to learn the life story of one of the 11,000 French children killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.
“Nothing is more moving, for a child, than the story of a child his own age, who has the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as he, but who, in the dawn of the 1940s, had the bad fortune to be defined as a Jew,” Sarkozy said at the end of a dinner speech to France’s Jewish community on Wednesday night.
He added that every French child should be “entrusted with the memory of a French child- victim of the Holocaust.”
Education Minister Xavier Darcos explained later that the aim of the plan was to “create an identification between a child of today and one of the same age who was deported and gassed.”
The Holocaust is already taught in French schools, but some psychiatrists and educators predicted that requiring students to identify with a specific victim would traumatize them.
Political opponents dismissed the plan as his latest misguided idea, unveiled without reflection or consultation.
Some historians argued that the focus on victims could steer attention away from the Vichy government’s collaboration with the Nazis.
Still others warned that the plan could backfire, creating resentment among France’s ethnic Arab and African populations if they felt their own histories were getting short shrift.
“Every day the president throws out a new unhappy idea with no coherence,” said Pascal Bruckner, the philosopher.
“But this last one is truly obscene, the very opposite of spirituality. Let’s judge it for what it is: a crazy proposal of the president, not the word of the Gospel.”
The initiative has also pitted some Jews against one another.
“It is unimaginable, unbearable, tragic and above all, unjust,” Simone Veil, a Holocaust survivor and honorary president of the Foundation for the Memory of the Holocaust, told the Web site of the magazine L’Express.
“You cannot inflict this on little ones of 10 years old! You cannot ask a child to identify with a dead child. The weight of this memory is much too heavy to bear.”
Ms. Veil was in the audience when Sarkozy spoke, and said that when she heard his words, “My blood turned to ice.”
On one level, Sarkozy’s plan is a logical extension of his sometimes sentimental and pedagogical approach to governing.
Last year, he enraged politicians on the left, the biggest union for high school teachers and some historians and teachers when he ordered all high schools in France to read a handwritten letter of a 17-year-old student who was executed by the Nazis for his resistance activities.