School discrimination in France as a public problem: late construction for hesitant implementation

Abstract

This article elaborares a stock of the construction of school discrimination as a public problem in France. It explores the paradox between certain recent institutional activism and the "timidity" of effective realisations. This distortion is partly explained by the normative structure of French republican citizenship of non-differentiation between citizens. However, this structure seems powerless to explain reports of otherness in French society, including in public administrations. As far as schools are concerned, the agenda of the fight against discrimination in schools is very late in the day and is covered in a series of confusions between racism, discrimination and harassment, attributable to the students, or to the agents and the educational institutions themselves.