Is Multiculturalism to Blame for the Failures of the French School?

This event is an introduction, screening, and reflection on the 2009 French movie Skirt Day, featuring Sylvie Laurent, the Harvard University W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow.

The ongoing discourse on the demise of the French integration model through public education is illustrated in this controversial depiction of a high school literature teacher in a disadvantaged neighborhood driven to the edge of insanity when she realizes the failure of the national values of secularism and gender equality she has desperately tried to convey to her students, most of them of Muslim descent. The movie draws on the issues that burden the schooling of French minorities today, be they racism, sexism, conflicting identities among youth, or the pervasive discourse on the overall failure of multiculturalism in Europe.