Tuesday, Mar. 29, 2005 - 9:19 p.m.
Laique - a rare French word with a dipthong
Wow, France really is fascinating. (Fact)I'm watching a program about the laique French schools v Muslim girls who want to wear the tchador. (NB excuse French spellings, but the only time I've discussed this written down before is in French class ... the topic never goes away.) It's one topic on which I just can't decide what I think.
I used to be really impressed that France was so egalitarian and didn't want any kind of religious paraphanalia in school, making everyone equal. This is a long-standing issue so I'm not sure exactly why it's come up again so recently so strongly. I thought it always was a law.
It's kind of noble thinking Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, atheists et al should all melt in together and learn together because you're at school to learn rather than be a religious being. But you should be able to use school for learning no matter what you're wearing.
Being a teenager can be completely awful regarding accepting your body. It's just one long gradient from girls completely covering themselves up and girls in tiny skimpy clothes, so where you draw the line between being acceptable or not seems quite arbitrary, and wouldn't it be awful to be in a schoolwhere they forbid girls to wear jeans or insist that you show a certain amount of cleavage? What's the difference between your state making you wear a covering and your state not letting you wear one?
Being an atheist Brit I think it's great to encourage female emancipation - emancipation for all! - and I'm sure there are cases of women being pressured into dressing certain ways. I'm sure all parties believe they're doing the right , however. I understand how people who dress soberly and covered up might look at 'us' and think the life of a 'liberated' woman is wrong. I certainly frown a bit at semi-naked drunk girls haning out in town centres at night - and I have been one. It can certainly be difficult and I'm always working out where the boundaries of 'liberty' are (and they're not always/hardly ever in the woman's favour). But the veiled French students in this program don't have any problem in speaking out and are intelligent. And yet the teachers all think the that if the women speak intelligently and with good arguments, they're being manipulated by fundamentalists. So who's oppressing the women now?
I pity the policy makers. How you can forbid Muslims to wear a headscarf but not a Sikh from wearing a turban? This is why Britain works/has worked, in its shaky way, because we don't want to write any rules down. See what trouble it gets you into. You can always protest, 'I never said that!'