uralsolo

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Everybody has limits set on their behavior in society generally, and in schools those limits are often more strict. I also object to the notion that enforced dress on a gendered basis is a "harmless or innocuous" practice.

invoking the UN

lol nerd

I worded it poorly, but my point was that France's enforcement of a dress code is far less extreme than the cultural intervention in Xinjiang. Furthermore I think that all of the people in this thread who've compared it to Native American residential schooling are themselves engaging in genocide denial by way of minimization.

wear shoes and shirt

wear dress that is explicitly designed to dehumanize you

these are the same thing

any visible deviations from the dominant (liberal Christian) culture.

This is an impasse. You look at French culture and see a liberal Christian one, I see a liberal secular one. When Christianity infects schools you don't get dress codes you get much more overt and disgusting propagandizing, like what's being pushed in Florida right now.

What reform of France's educational establishment would satisfy you? Should they move their weekends to Mondays and Tuesdays in order to avoid accidentally aligning with any religious practice's day of rest?

This is a ridiculous standard to hold any societal institution to. Because France's dominant culture has been Christian for many years, its secular institutions of course have echoes of Christian practice within them - but this is not proof that they are Christian institutions.

Education is good. Education should be given to every single person in society, and every person in it should have a right to receive a full secular education regardless of their parents' opinion on the matter. And during the course of that education, class, ethnic, and religious differences between children should be minimized in order to socialize children into being tolerant, metropolitan citizens.

"Democratic Socialism" is a term for a specific school of thought within socialism that I am criticizing for its tendency to align with imperial, ie US/NATO foreign policy that has created a system of unequal exchange that keeps most of the world in poverty in order to fund the excesses of the first world. It does not mean "socialism but we have a democracy", that's every form of socialism. Also it generally has a different meaning when applied to socialist movements in third world countries, which is why I wouldn't criticize a party like MAS for the same reason.

I consider China's Whole-Process People's Democracy to be the current gold standard democratic process on this planet. Democracy should not end when people vote for their representatives, it should be a constant process of polling and implementing the will of the people, and its success is why Chinese citizens have among the highest satisfaction with their government of anyone.

The kids aren't being made to attend church on Sunday. They're being made to be part of a secular society, one that takes its secularism more seriously than many other countries do.

Presumably if a bunch of Mormons or Mennonites or whatever else set up in France and all their kids dressed the same way, the school would step in on that too. Maybe they wouldn't, but then the problem isn't the policy it's biased enforcement.

Are kids meaningfully capable of exercising their freedom of conscience though? I'm not suggesting that every religious parent would kick their children out of the house for not dressing a certain way, but I am saying that every religious parent puts their finger on the scale of their kids' decision. Schools can and should seek to eliminate these kinds of cultural differences within the student body because it teaches kids to segregate themselves, that's why school uniforms are generally a good thing.

I would argue that indoctrinating a child into wearing religious dress is a violation of that child's human rights and that they should be protected from it by the state.

Real talk if you're fine with China's anti-extremism program in Xinjiang and you're not fine with France enforcing secular clothing in its schools then you need to reflect on your double standards. While France has many instances of Islamophobia and I'm sure this policy has been implemented poorly in many places, the fact is that children should be protected from being forced into certain restrictive practices by their parents. Shit like this is why all schools should have uniforms - visible class and cultural distinctions only push the kids to segregate themselves, wiping away those distinctions at the door is an extremely valuable part of social education.