Question 23910 — overseas

Summary

Mr. Jean-Philippe Nilor alerts the Minister of National Education and Youth to the consequences of the education reform on regional languages, particularly Creole. The overseas educational community is worried. In Martinique, voices are being raised to denounce this upcoming reform which consists of lowering from 4 to 2 the coefficient assigned to regional languages. If it were to materialize, it would be a serious threat to the teaching of Creole, a living language spoken in most of the island territories which make up the French whole. In addition, it is the link that links the West Indians to the other peoples of the Caribbean, the region to which the West Indies belong. Among the so-called regional languages, Creole occupies a significant place. There are 19,385,022 inhabitants who practice it in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and in North America. For the Antilles Guyana region alone, there are 1,099,500. In Martinique, each year the Creole CAPES attracts a significant number of students. A craze which reflects the growing place of the teaching of this language in the education system and its role in the development of young Martinicans and the teaching profession. In this context, the reform project would send the wrong signal to society. It risks precarious deserving teachers and divert many students from learning so-called regional languages. To understand the indignation of the school community, we must remember that the right to teach Creole was won hard and helped to promote an entire section of intangible heritage which has its roots in history. It is also necessary to remember that many generations of Martinicans are left on the side of the road for not having had the possibility - rather the authorization - to conceptualize and express themselves in their mother tongue while attending the schools of the Republic. For all those who, even today, get bogged down in the maze of social exclusion, the Creole language constitutes the tenuous thread of their interactions. The artifact by which they are and remain in the world. What about their feeling of belonging to a social reference group if their identity is called into question? This measure goes to the very foundation of societies. Moreover, would this be a pernicious attempt to inhibit linguistic faculties? Or, a social decline in total opposition to republican values? He contests and opposes this reform in that it tends to stigmatize entire populations and - worse - discriminate against future generations in what forms their unique identity. The function of language in the construction of the individual and its role in the process - constantly unfinished - of civic education and relationships with the world is an established fact. By underpinning the idea of ​​a hierarchy between languages, will this reform not flout the shared ambition of protecting education and equal opportunities? Because how can we promote such objectives without preserving, protecting and enhancing what is meaningful in the existence of each citizen? Is it not a fundamental right to recognize the individual's freedom to use and abuse their mother tongue, a consubstantial attribute of their verticality? If the answers to these questions are necessary, they nevertheless reveal certain limits of this reform which, in reality, blacklists a language that is poorly known and unknown. Indeed, the Creole language - because it is a language, with being regional - is the instrument of communication from which children learned to discover, understand and interact with the environment around them. It is a set of representational corpora from which they were able to establish themselves in the world in order to be and exist. Its learning therefore falls within the fundamental rights of the citizen. Therefore, all initiative tending to reduce its scope in the construction of identity will have the aim of exacerbating the feeling of injustice, or even rejection. The teaching of Creole cannot be the adjustment variable of an educational policy with variable geometry. Wouldn't relegating it to the rank of "sub-language" have the effect of sharpening extremist proselytism whose roots we know and which we see flourishing in each election? Lower the coefficient of regional languages ​​is nonsense which stigmatizes, divides, fuels frustration and exasperation. Consequently, he asks him if he intends to assume being recorded in History as being the one who initiated the decline of regional languages ​​while running the risk of insidiously conveying stubborn prejudices and representations that we believed to be over, because they were unworthy of the Republic. Finally he hears the indignation citizens? He asks him if this is not an opportunity to affirm the attachment to diversity, to the equality of all in terms of access to linguistic skills, a major element in the future of Martinican youth.

Machine translation from French. The official text remains authoritative.

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