Violence -- French schools go US way

Violence -- French schools go US way
AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE

PARIS, JANUARY 23: The attempted murder of an 11-year-old by fellow students and the ordeal of a 17-year-old terrorized by classmates has drawn into stark relief the problem of violence in French schools.

In the first incident, in Mantes-la-Jolie, west of Paris, three boys, aged between 16 and 18, allegedly tried to murder an 11-year-old Spanish schoolmate after he refused to continue doing their Spanish homework. To punish the boy, the trio threw him down a school staircase. On Thursday, they were formally placed under criminal investigation.

The second incident took place in the northeast town of Longwy, where three students were arrested last week for terrorizing a fellow classmate for months. The boy, who was too scared to tell his parents or teachers of his ordeal, was beaten on the knuckles with a hammer, punched and burned with a hot iron rod. ``I couldn't talk about it to anyone,'' the 17-year-old, identified only as Sebastien, said. ``I was afraid of what they would do to me but some of the otherstudents knew what was happening and no one said a thing.''

The two cases and a series of strikes by teachers and parents, sparked by violence elsewhere, have forced the government to recognize the urgency of tackling the problem. Education Minister Claude Allegre said he planned to submit a report next Thursday on measures to prevent violence in schools and pledged to increase by 20,000 the country's 65,000 assistant teachers.

According to a government report issued last year, violence in schools is not out of control but the outbursts are so shocking that they create a daily atmosphere of tension. ``No one even reacts anymore to classrooms that are ransacked, or when things are stolen or people robbed,'' striking secondary school teachers in a suburb of Lyon, central France, said on Friday in a statement.

According to Jean Rony, Law professor at the Universite de Paris, much of the violence can be attributed to youngsters from troubled homes or neighbourhoods with a changing social profile.

``Theseareas have turned into ghettos over the years with the middle- and working-class leaving and being replaced by immigrants,'' he said. ``As a result you have classes in many areas made up mostly of foreign students from 10 or 15 nationalities,''he added. ``Many of them fail because of a quirk in the French school system which, in the name of equality, means students hardly ever repeat a year to get up to standard.''