THE INDEPENDENT: President Nicolas Sarkozy has provoked controversy by ordering that every 10-year-old in France should know the name and life story of a French-Jewish child who died in the Holocaust.
His proposal that primary school children should be, in effect, "twinned" with young victims of the Nazi genocide has generated a cacophony of protest, as well as praise.
Most teaching unions have condemned the proposal as ill-considered and likely to place too great an emotional and psychological burden on the young. Even some Jewish leaders and writers fear the idea is "exceptionally morbid" and could provoke an anti-Semitic backlash. MPs have complained that M. Sarkozy is trying to micro-manage the national curriculum and impose too emotive an approach on the learning of history.
However, most Jewish organisations have welcomed the idea, as have some of the President's leading left-wing opponents, including his main rival in last year's election, Ségolène Royal.
In a speech to France's main Jewish group, M. Sarkozy said that from next year, each pupil in their final year of primary school would be "entrusted with the memory" of one of the 11,000 French-Jewish children who were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. "[10 and 11-year-olds] must learn the name and life story of a child who died in the Shoah," he said. "Nothing is more moving for children than to read the story of a child their own age, who had the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as they have.
"This is a way of fighting all kinds of racism, all kinds of discrimination, all kinds of barbarity by reaching children through the story of children of their own age." Sarkozy: Pupils will be 'twinned' with Nazi victims >>> By John Lichfield in Paris
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