At his book “Omerta dans l’Education nationale”, which will be published on September 7, former headmaster Patrice Romain lifts the veil on the reasons for the unease of many headmasters.
There is a lot of talk about the headmasters’ duty of confidentiality. Is that the point at issue?
Let’s put it this way: it is the head teachers who tend to impose this duty of discretion on themselves and censor themselves. Because if they dare to denounce wrongdoing, their careers are ruined. This is the famous “””Don’t throw mud at the students”” that is talked about so much. If a teacher has a horrendous pupil in his class, reports it to the headmaster and he imposes a punishment, it is bound to be noted somewhere. A very bad impression for the school management, because officially a well-functioning school is a school where everything is fine. So it happens that some losers put a kind of pressure on the members of the teaching team: “But how come it is complicated with this pupil, while everything is going well with the other teachers?”.
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In the chapter of your book dedicated to secularism, you remind us that the headmaster is in the front line. Has the headmaster received more support from his superiors since the murder of Samuel Paty?
Unfortunately, absolutely not! This was shown recently in the polemic about the wearing of the abaya. It would have been the minister’s job to give a clear instruction and say whether this attire is allowed in schools or not. Instead, school headmasters were asked to decide for themselves at the local level. This is not tenable. Religiously motivated incidents have been on the rise for years, while people turn a blind eye to it. One headmaster told me about a pupil who had beaten up another because the latter disregarded the Ramadan fasting commandment on the way to the canteen. The alarmed “courageous” academic headmaster replied that “it’s none of our business”. This is because the latter, who can be called the head of education at the departmental level, is also graded by the state high school board (recteur).
The fewer violations of secularism in his field, the better. You mentioned the case of Samuel Paty: the report of the Inspectorate General of Education, Sports and Research said that the administration had nothing to reproach itself for. Now, it is not the case that one makes progress by concealing one’s mistakes. Unfortunately, I am convinced that such disasters will happen again. We must never forget that the omertà that weighs on school headmasters can have terrible consequences. L’Express