{"id":2357,"date":"2017-03-31T19:53:50","date_gmt":"2017-04-01T03:53:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/?p=2357"},"modified":"2017-11-08T21:39:42","modified_gmt":"2017-11-08T19:39:42","slug":"women-as-national-education-chiefs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/2017\/03\/31\/women-as-national-education-chiefs\/","title":{"rendered":"Women as national education chiefs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.najat-vallaud-belkacem.com\/\">Najat Vallaud-Belkacem<\/a> is the first woman\u00a0Minister of Education in France, in office\u00a0since 2014 in\u00a0the second half of Fran\u00e7ois Hollande&#8217;s presidency. (Before becoming Minister of Education she\u00a0was also the Minister for Women&#8217;s\u00a0Rights and subsequently\u00a0also Minister for Youth, Sports and of Urban Affairs; it turns out she isn&#8217;t\u00a0the first French Minister of Education <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/najatvb\">to use Twitter<\/a>.) <\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>She was born in Morocco (and has had to think plenty about\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2012\/jun\/22\/najat-vallaud-belkacem-france\">eluding\u00a0the &#8220;diversity&#8221; pigeonhole<\/a>); I&#8217;ve\u00a0long been struck by\u00a0her charisma as a public speaker (which isn&#8217;t to say that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2012\/jul\/16\/french-minister-women-muslims\">her political projects have always been unproblematic<\/a>, needless to say).<\/p>\n<p>In any case, I came across a recent interview in which she makes an interesting comment on the\u00a0cultural value of education in France:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"880\" height=\"495\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/gOzwxSkUlaQ?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" gesture=\"media\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll transcribe:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u2014 Vous \u00eates la premi\u00e8re femme ministre nationale de l&#8217;Education dans la R\u00e9publique. On a un probl\u00e8me avec les femmes en politique!<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 \u00c7a va mieux quand m\u00eame! Non mais je commence toujours par faire un diagnostique qui se veut relativement positif, parce que sinon, c&#8217;est d\u00e9primant et jsuis pas l\u00e0 (?) pour \u00eatre d\u00e9cliniste. Je fais pas partie des gens \u2014 et il y en a plein dans le paysage politique actuel \u2014 qui croient que c&#8217;\u00e9tait mieux autrefois. Euh non. Par exemple sur la question que vous m&#8217;\u00eates pos\u00e9e, autrefois, les femmes, elles \u00e9taient nulle part. Le fait qu&#8217;il a fallu attendre 2014 pour avoir\u00a0<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><em>une<\/em><\/span> femme\u00a0Ministre de l&#8217;Education, ce sur quoi \u00e7a en dit long, c&#8217;est en fait comment dans notre pays on per\u00e7oit l&#8217;\u00e9ducation. On per\u00e7oit l&#8217;\u00e9ducation comme un vrai levier de pouvoir. Et c&#8217;est pour \u00e7a qu&#8217;on n&#8217;y a pas mis de femmes. Parce que, malgr\u00e9 tout, on continue \u00e0 donner le vrai pouvoir aux hommes.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Vous pensez que c&#8217;est pour \u00e7a ? Vraiment ?<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Ouais, oui\u00a0fondamentalement je pense que c&#8217;est \u00e7a. M\u00eame si je pense que parfois \u00e7a s&#8217;est jou\u00e9 inconsciemment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In English this comes out to:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u2014 You are the first woman National Minister of Education in the Republic. We have a problem with women in politics!<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Oh, but it&#8217;s\u00a0getting\u00a0better. No I mean, I always start out with a relatively positive assessment, because otherwise, it&#8217;s depressing, and I&#8217;m not here to be a defeatist. I&#8217;m not one of those people \u2014\u00a0and there are lots of them in the current political landscape \u2014 who believe that formerly it was\u00a0better. Uh no. For example, with the question you&#8217;ve asked me, formerly, women, they were nowhere. And the fact that we had to wait until 2014 to have\u00a0a\u00a0woman\u00a0Minister of Education, it speaks volumes about how our country perceives education. We perceive education as a real instrument\u00a0of power. And that&#8217;s why they didn&#8217;t put women there. Because, in spite of everything, they continue to give the real power to the men.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 You think that&#8217;s what it is? Really?<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Yeah, yes, basically I think it&#8217;s that. Even if I think that sometimes it works unconsciously.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So basically, Vallaud-Belkacem&#8217;s view is that <em>it&#8217;s because\u00a0we respect the power of education that we haven&#8217;t had a woman minister of education before<\/em>. Within\u00a0the\u00a0familiar patriarchal logic that she evokes, women are by definition low-status, so\u00a0they must be kept out of roles that are high-status;\u00a0masculine exclusivity thereby becomes\u00a0a sign of societal esteem.<\/p>\n<p>The comparative question that immediately comes to my mind is: What&#8217;s the gender\u00a0history of the U.S. equivalent role, the federal Secretary of Education?\u00a0It turns out (I didn&#8217;t know this) that the U.S. Department of Education was <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/United_States_Department_of_Education#Establishment\">created by Carter in 1979-80<\/a>, and that\u00a0the very first Secretary of Education\u00a0was a woman, Shirley Hufstedler. The job was then <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/United_States_Secretary_of_Education#List_of_Secretaries_of_Education\">monopolized\u00a0by men from 1981-2005<\/a>; after which\u00a0there have been two women\u00a0in office, Margaret Spellings in\u00a0George W. Bush&#8217;s second term and Betsy DeVos under Trump. Nevertheless,\u00a0neither GWB nor Trump\u00a0put education at the center of their political or ideological projects (though <a href=\"http:\/\/www.edweek.org\/ew\/section\/multimedia\/no-child-left-behind-overview-definition-summary.html\">No Child Left Behind<\/a>\u00a0was admittedly a large educational intervention early in GWB&#8217;s term).<\/p>\n<p>In short, a cursory comparison\u00a0seems to confirm Vallaud-Belkacem&#8217;s intuition. The United States has had several women Secretaries of Education and simultaneously\u00a0it values education less as a zone of national politics than France does. This value difference is, however, also partly an organizational artifact, since in France but not in the U.S., public education\u00a0is\u00a0directly part of the state apparatus. It seems to make\u00a0sense that since public education is somewhat decentralized in the U.S. context, the national education bureaucracy would be diminished in\u00a0symbolic value.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Najat Vallaud-Belkacem is the first woman\u00a0Minister of Education in France, in office\u00a0since 2014 in\u00a0the second half of Fran\u00e7ois Hollande&#8217;s presidency. (Before becoming Minister of Education she\u00a0was also the Minister for Women&#8217;s\u00a0Rights and subsequently\u00a0also Minister for Youth, Sports and of Urban Affairs; it turns out she isn&#8217;t\u00a0the first French Minister of Education to use Twitter.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[485,488,489],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2357"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2357"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2357\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2502,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2357\/revisions\/2502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}