The Epoch Times reports that the French government has recently banned schools from using certain “gender-neutral” or “inclusive” language in its schools. The government said it would be destructive to the French language and prevent people from learning it.
Nathalie Elimas, deputy education minister, said on Thursday that such writing is “a danger to our country” and will “sound the death knell for the use of French in the world,” according to The Associated Press.
Some liberal groups, politicians and teacher’s unions are attempting to alter certain words, adding midpoints in nouns and adjectives and sometimes in verbs to make the language more feminine.
Jean-Michel Blanquer, the minister of education, sent a decree to stop using midpoints that attempt to designate both male and female endings to words.
“So-called ‘inclusive’ writing should be avoided, which notably uses the midpoint to simultaneously reveal the feminine and masculine forms of a word used in the masculine when it is used in one sense,” the decree said.
“In addition, this writing, which results in the fragmentation of words and agreements, constitutes an obstacle to reading and understanding the written word. The impossibility of verbally transcribing texts using this type of writing hampers reading aloud as well as pronunciation, and consequently learning, especially for the youngest.”
SUD Education Union, the French teacher’s union, is pushing back.
“SUD Education demands from the Minister that he stop trying to impose his backwardness on the educational community,” it said, according to a translation. “SUD calls on staff to take no account of these instructions from another time, and to exercise as they wish, depending on professional situations, the full use of their pedagogical freedom.”
French President Emanuel Macron sounded the alarm earlier this year that leftist “social science theories entirely imported from the United States” is a threat to French society.
