Pap Ndiaye, a symbolic choice at head of national education

This 57-year-old historian, specialist in American social history, presents a profile that contrasts with that of his predecessor, Jean-Michel Blanquer.

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This is “the” surprise appointment of the reshuffle: the historian Pap Ndiaye, 57, became, Friday, May 20, Minister of National Education and Youth. Other names had circulated in recent days – those of Gabriel Attal, Bruno Le Maire or Julien Denormandie – to succeed Jean -Michel Blanquer and settle on rue de Grenelle. It was ultimately on that of Pap Ndiaye, university professor, specialist in social history of the United States, that the new Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, and the head of state, Emmanuel Macron, reached an agreement.

“I am a pure product of republican meritocracy, whose school is the pillar”, put forward Pap Ndiaye when the powers organized, on Friday evening, with Jean-Michel Blanquer at the Ministry of the ‘education. He addressed his first “thoughts” to Samuel Paty and the teaching world. “A world that has been mine for a long time,” he said, explicitly referring to his mother professor.

“The choice is worth symbol”, we were blowing before this ceremony in the school circles, so much Pap Ndiaye like a “man of consensus”, when Jean-Michel Blanquer, at the end of ‘A mandate with record longevity, had become divisive.

It is already to appease the spirits that the Associate of History had been placed by Emmanuel Macron, in February 2021, at the head of the palace of the Doride Center, which houses the immigration museum, with The objective of calming tensions around a highly flammable subject – colonial history. Here he is now busy, in a strategic sector for this second five -year term Macron, to reconnect with dialogue with teachers scalded by two years of health crisis and “vertical” management accused of his predecessor.

“I Sense cooler than “woke” “

Between Ndiaye the historian and Blanquer the lawyer, it is not just a difference in style or tone. There is also a very clear rupture, in terms of ideas: the “woke” ideology is a “scarecrow more than a social or ideological reality”, said Pap Ndiaye in the world, in January 2022. The crusade against “Islamo-leftism” and “wokism” embodied, in recent years, by Mr. Blanquer.

of “WOKE” activists, Mr. Ndiaye also said this to M Le Magazine du Monde, in June 2021: “I share most of their causes, such as feminism, the fight for environmental protection or the ‘Anti -racism, but I do not approve of the moralizing or sectarian speeches of some of them. I feel cooler than “WOKE”, it is undoubtedly a question of generation. “

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/Media reports.