European Secularism and the Religious “Separatism” Controversy – Part 3

Earlier articles reviewed the attack on religious life in Europe as contrary to the secular culture that secularists want to be the norm for society, and specifically how this effort is developing in France. This article will review how it is impacting religious education France, and particularly with respect to homeschooling.

Religious education of children and young people has been under attack in Western Europe for at least the last two decades, with homeschooling prohibited in Germany and Sweden. High profile cases in both countries involved homeschooling families running afoul of state authorities. The coronavirus epidemic has occasioned a temporary end to the homeschool ban in Germany, although with what ultimate effect is unclear. The focus of the ongoing controversy is now in France, where President Emmanuel Macron has proposed essentially banning homeschooling.

Restrictive Legislation

The beginning of the current attack on homeschooling and religious education in France began in 2018, with Macron announcing that education would be mandatory from age three. This was included in new legislation which was passed by the French Assembly (the national legislature’s lower house) in early 2019. The proposed new law was called the “School of Trust.”  As the Homeschool Legal Defense Association notes, this law began to be implemented by school authorities in 2019 before it was passed. It provides for a system of mandatory inspections of homeschoolers by state authorities (the Education Department). HSLDA observes that its staff are largely opposed to homeschooling or any education other that the state’s secular education program. These authorities can determine if homeschooling is adequate, and after two inspections (with no definite time in between) can require a child to attend the state school.

Until the past year, homeschooling has been legal in France, protected under an 1882 law, but also as HSLDA notes, by the constitutions of France’s Fourth (1946) and Fifth (1958) Republics. But last summer the French government moved to further restrict homeschooling. In new legislation inspectors hold power to determine “the terms and place of annual inspections.” Additional pressure is expected “to follow the national curriculum.” Families who cannot meet the conditions of these inspections may be required to enroll their children in school.

The homeschooling legislation was tied to larger “equality and citizenship” bill aimed at fighting “racism and discrimination” and would limit establishment of private schools that teach a particular “religious or philosophical point of view.” The French newspaper La Croix has said that the homeschool “inspector must ensure that the child is not subjected to ideological or political influence contrary to republican values.” In the course of these changes, France moved from a regime of notification by parents of intent to homeschool to permission granting by the state.

This new regime was resisted by homeschoolers at the time. French homeschooling families, HSLDA noted, pointed out that both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Charter of the Fundamental Rights of the European Union say that parents have a right “to ensure the education and teaching of their children in conformity with their religious, philosophical, and pedagogical convictions.”

Terrorist Attack Justifies Attack on Religious Education

Following the murder (by decapitation) of a French school teacher who displayed obscene illustrations of Mohammed, Macron used the opportunity to propose banning homeschooling. Key in Macron’s speech announcing his action was the declaration that “obscurantism and the violence that accompanies it shall not win.”

Both the Homeschool Legal Defense Association and others have observed that Macron is particularly intent on capturing the hearts, as well as the minds, or children, and excluding any religious ideas or commitments. Macron’s speech announcing his intention to ban homeschooling says that school is:

“what makes it possible for us to protect our children in a complete way from any religious sign, from religion. It is truly the heart of the space of secularism, and it is this place where we form consciences so that children become free, rational citizens, able to choose their own lives.”

That children need to be protected “from religion,” that this is an “intimate” matter which should be treasured, and that consciences should be formed by the state rather than the Word of God is thus a direct attack on Biblical doctrine (which must be decisive and final with Christians), and the international rights standards noted above.

Macron is quite explicit that he wants children insulated from religious beliefs and commitments in their formative years, from age three on. Even private, independent schools are to be required to follow the state curriculum, as was done in Sweden in 2007. As the linked article notes, “it is clearly established that not a single perpetrator of terrorist attacks in France came from independent schools.”

Macron clearly assumes that state education is objective and rational, while religious and family education is biased. Secularist education substitutes the values of the state and its idea of a righteous life for religious claims of transcendently based values. It also ignores that the personal being claimed as ultimate reality by Christianity necessarily evokes an emotional response. But this is not a reason parents or schools should be forbidden from teaching Christian doctrine as the truth. To deny parents or schools the right to teach Christianity as the truth necessarily involves some other concept of the truth (e.g., that Christian doctrine is doubtful, etc.).

In trying to mold the hearts as well as the minds of children, the clear idea Macron is advancing is that religious doctrine is irrational, emotional, binds the hearts of impressionable children to irrational ideas and causes pain and division. But the state is simply offering an alternative worldview, one that is right because the state has determined that it is correct. Without the state claiming a transcendent source for its doctrines, state education simply reflects the ideas of the regime that has prevailed. Parents, however, are the most natural educators of children, with a natural affinity for one another (and in Biblical religion, parents are certainly proper educators). The state is far from neutral in its view of the world. In particular it is affected by groups which are influential with it.

Constitutional Protection for Religious Education

There is real hope that the ban on homeschooling will never be enacted. The French Council of State, France’s highest administrative court, believes that the ban is unconstitutional. While this opinion is not a binding pronouncement, it may move the Constitutional Council, France’s highest constitutional authority, which does have the power to disallow it, to delete the portions of Macron’s proposed law on separatism related to homeschooling. The Council of State observed that:

“​This ban is not supported by reliable and documented evidence on the reasons, conditions and results of the practice of teaching within the family; it has not been established, in particular, that the parents’ motives relate in a significant way to a desire for social separatism or a challenge to the values ​​of the Republic. In these conditions, the transition from a regime of framed and controlled freedom to a regime of prohibition does not seem sufficiently justified and proportionate … The Council of State, therefore, excludes from the law project the provisions relating to home education.”

Currently, there are about 50,000 homeschoolers in France, one of the largest homeschooling populations in Europe. As HSLDA notes, homeschooling associations in France have strongly opposed the ban. One organization, LAIA, has said that:

“Mr. Macron is shooting at the wrong target: home educated children are neither lost, nor adrift, nor off the radar, nor invisible. They are well and truly integrated into society, as responsible citizens, not hiding themselves but feeling proud. But has he ever met any?”

HSLDA own letter to the French President, to which numerous homeschool groups signed on, declared that:

• There is no link between homeschooling and radicalism or separatism and that “home educated children are as integrated into society as children educated in any other way.”
• “Protecting the right of home education demonstrates a strong commitment to the principles of freedom, which are to be expected from democratic societies such as France.”
• There have been numerous treaties signed by France that protect the freedom of parents and children to choose the best kind of education for themselves.

The news website ConnexionFrance has observed that the Jules Ferry Law of 1882, which advanced the secularization of education in France at that time, and endeavored to advance universal education, says that it is instruction, not school attendance, which is required in France. It also notes that the French Prime Minister, Jean Castex, has agreed that “we must not make a mistake in targeting the wrong people.” 

While the Council of State and homeschool advocates maintain that homeschooling is a right, homeschooled children are well integrated into society, and no threat “republican values,” HSLDA also points to another advocate of educational freedom in France, Guillaume de Thieulloy. He maintains that a serious problem is that “it is not defined in the law what these values are, and it could be up to the unfettered discretion of local officials to decide, which would be a huge problem.” This is indeed a problem, since Macron’s proposed law, as now written, could “require parents to sign a statement supporting ‘French republican values’ before allowing them to teach their children at home.” 

Much like the struggles with judicial review in the United States, in which judges tending toward secularism have used general ideas of liberty and equality to enact their own policy preferences, so secularists in France appeal to “republican values” to exclude religious instruction from the education of children, although the educational freedom to homeschool is guaranteed in French law, and the right to religious education is guaranteed by France’s international commitments.

As James Hitchcock describes in the essay linked to in the first article of this series, the attempt by liberal states to focus on what it means to be free moves secular nations from the “political liberalism” of freedom for people with different worldviews to participate in politics, to a “comprehensive liberalism” that endeavors to bring freedom to all of personal life, so reducing the real freedom of people, especially religious people with commitments regarding ultimate reality, to live their lives in accordance with their beliefs. But whatever regime Christians may live under, they bear the duty to obey God in all circumstances, regardless of state edicts, and to educate their children in the fear and admonition of the Lord (Eph. 6:4).