5 septembre 2010

 

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Par Mona BEN GAMRA 24 mille élèves inscrits dans le privé, soit un pourcentage de 2,4%. L’enseignement public reste la référence aux yeux des parents d’élèves, indépendamment des considérations matérielles Les parents ne s’y trompent pas, loin des statistiques et des chiffres abstraits, la rentrée scolaire est une période décisive pour choisir l’établissement scolaire pour leur futur écolier. Ecole privée ou publique ? Cela induit des thématiques assez importantes qui permettent de trancher.    Faut-il opter pour une école privée résolument tournée vers l’apprentissage des langues, clé d’accès à tous les enseignements? Ou encore faut-il choisir l’école publique, où la gratuité de l’enseignement, par ailleurs un acquis, est ‘’contournée’’ à grands renforts de cours particuliers ? Selon les statistiques de l’année scolaire 2009/2010, les élèves inscrits dans des écoles privées, au nombre de 24000 ne représentent que l’infime pourcentage de 2,4% par rapport aux élèves  recensés dans des écoles primaires étatiques, soit 1 200 000 élèves. « Au regard de ces chiffres, on ne peut en aucune manière considérer que l’école publique peut être détrônée par l’école privée, même si le nombre des établissements privés a affiché une nette augmentation pendant l’année scolaire écoulée(104), si on le compare à celui d’il y a 10 ans. En 2001/2002 ils étaient au nombre de 42. A cela ajoutons le fait que ces écoles sont actuellement implantées à l’intérieur du pays à Kairouan, Kasserine, Gafsa, Sidi Bouzid et Gabès, outre ceux déjà existant à Sousse, Nabeul, Bizerte et au grand Tunis. » remarque M. Mohamed Zoghlami, le directeur de l’enseignement privé au ministère de l’éducation nationale. C’est que, et toujours selon notre interlocuteur,  l’égalité des chances à l’école n’est pas un beau  slogan qu’on brandit à chaque fois qu’il est question d’évoquer l’enseignement dans notre pays. «  La seule gratuité de l’école, par ailleurs un acquis pour nous autres Tunisiens, suffit pour dire que tous les enfants quelle que soit leur appartenance sociale sont égaux face à l’apprentissage. » dit-il. Règles sacro-saintes Cela ne sera pas vraiment le cas si l’on considère que les établissements privés se chargent de la garde des enfants pendant les heures creuses, une solution salutaire pour des parents qui travaillent, alors que d’autres enfants ayant le même âge se retrouvent dans la rue et ses tentations, une fois les heures de l’école terminées. Sans oublier la discipline qui est de mise dans les écoles privées bien plus qu’ailleurs. Selon Mme Sondès Khélifi, médecin, « Les directeurs des écoles privés mènent à la baguette les enfants dans leurs établissements respectifs. Ils ne badinent pas avec les règles de politesse et de bonne tenue.  C’est essentiellement pour ce  motif que j’ai choisi d’inscrire ma fille dans une école privée sise à la cité Ennasr. Je suis satisfaite même si mon mari juge que l’apprentissage des langues depuis la première année de base relève du bourrage d’esprit. »  souligne notre interlocutrice. 1517 enseignants contrôlés par les inspections de base dans les écoles étatiques Et puisqu’on y est, on apprend et d’après une source du ministère de l’éducation que l’apprentissage des langues dès six ans sera généralisé dans les écoles étatiques. Reste à savoir si  la qualité de l’enseignement dispensé que ce soit dans les écoles privées ou publiques serait la même.  D’aucuns considèrent que la qualité de l’enseignement dans les écoles publiques laisse à désirer, que des parents bienveillants  compensent par des cours particuliers les éventuelles défaillances constatées et ce même pour des enfants en première année de l’enseignement de base. Pour y répondre M. Zoghlami invoque le fait que les garde-fous du ministère  veillent à garder la même qualité de l’enseignement aussi bien dispensée dans des écoles publiques que privées. «  Les enseignants qui étaient au nombre de 1517 pendant l’année dernière ont tous suivi  les mêmes cycles de formation et en classe, leurs cours donnés ont été  contrôlés par les mêmes cycles d’inspection. Le programme des écoles primaires privées est passé au crible par le ministère de tutelle dont les prérogatives consistent à vérifier leur conformité aux objectifs des programmes de l’enseignement étatique. Pour le choix des enseignants cela revient à ces établissements de les recruter.» souligne-t-il. Il y a lieu de remarquer dans la foulée, qu’un enseignant ayant exercé dans le domaine étatique n’a pas le droit d’enseigner dans le privé et que l’Etat incite les directeurs de ces institutions à recruter les jeunes diplômés, par ailleurs non expérimentés.  Et ce au grand dam des parents qui espèrent profiter de l’expérience de nos doyens de l’enseignement. Equilibre L’école privée pourra-t-elle détrôner l’école étatique ? Jamais ! Car toute la démarche se base sur l’équilibre.  Les deux volets de l’enseignement ont aussi bien des avantages que des inconvénients. La question serait plutôt de réorganiser notre école, à partir de la maternelle pour que la véritable égalité des chances, consiste à permettre de cultiver les jeunes esprits, de les accompagner véritablement vers leurs aspirations, en profitant au mieux de leurs capacités. « Aujourd’hui, le cartable de nos petits bout’ choux s’alourdit  et leurs capacités d’apprentissage s’affaiblissent. Nous leurs parents, avons réussi à être brillants à l’école avec moins de matières étudiées.» remarque Mme Leila Megdiche, maman de Linda, 4ème année de l’enseignement de base.  Il est plus que temps, en effet, de revoir tout le système scolaire et avec  les méthodes d’apprentissage,… De le faire en toute conscience pour que ces générations d’élèves ne se transforment en cobayes de l’enseignement. Il est  temps de “sonner la fin de la récréation.”

 

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Par Dr.  James J Zogby During the past week, as the U.S. president Barack Obama announced the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces from Iraq, there was considerable media commentary focusing on the lies that had been utilized to build public support for the war. The two that received the most attention were the argument that Saddam had an active program to develop weapons of mass destruction and the assertion, made most vigorously by the then vice president Dick Cheney, that there were “proven links” connecting the Iraqi leadership to the terrorist attacks on September 11. Both were, of course, deliberate fabrications but both did play important roles in shaping public opinion and justifying the invasion of Iraq. The propaganda effort to win support for the war involved much more. As I note in my forthcoming book What they are saying to us and why it matters: Arab Voices, proponents for the war, preying on the public’s lack of basic information about Iraq and its people, made exaggerated claims expressing confidence that the effort would be relatively painless. A former official at the Pentagon termed it a “cakewalk”. Mr Cheney said “it’ll go … quickly. Weeks rather than months”. Paul Wolfowitz, another advisor in the Bush administration, estimated the cost of the entire enterprise not to exceed one or two billion dollars, with Iraq’s oil revenues quickly kicking in to “finance its own reconstruction”. Throughout the media universe, commentators echoed these boasts, regularly churning out outrageous claims on a par with Saddam Hussein’s pre–Gulf War warning that the conflict would be the “mother of all battles”. Before the invasion began, for example, Bill O’Reilly, a commentator of Fox News, wagered “the best dinner in the gaslight district of San Diego that military action will not last more than a week”. A similarly euphoric (and ultimately equally misleading) statement by Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, soon followed: “There is a certain amount of pop psychology in America that the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni . . . There’s almost no evidence of that at all.” Finally, journalist Fred Barnes, another host of a programme on Fox News, chimed in: “The war was the hard part . . . It gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but not as hard as winning a war.” This endless and deadly “spinning” didn’t end with the invasion. Six months into the war, Zogby International conducted the first-ever nationwide poll in Iraq showing that a disturbingly high percentage of Iraqis (including almost the entire Sunni population and a strong majority of Shia) wanted the US to leave their country, did not have a favourable view of the US military’s behaviour, and were not inclined to establish a democracy in Iraq. A few days after these findings were released, Mr Cheney was on a television news programme citing our poll as evidence of “very positive news”, and using them to make his case that all was going well. The same penchant for fabrication was in evidence in the hype surrounding the “surge” that the Bush administration implemented in early 2007. It is true that sectarian and intra-sect violence declined during this same period. But the reasons for this decline had more to do with the fact that the “ethnic cleansing” operations launched by sectarian groups had already left Baghdad’s neighbourhoods purged and divided by barricades. Sunni tribal groups had organised and armed themselves to fight against al Qa’eda before the surge of U.S. troops began. Despite all this, the same cast of characters who promoted the fabrications that led the U.S. into the war had the temerity to upbraid Mr Obama for failing to give George W Bush sufficient credit for successfully implementing measures that ended the war . The U.S. combat forces have now been withdrawn, but this war is not over, it has not been a success, and US responsibility has not ended. Iraq remains a fragile country, divided internally and surrounded by neighbors, some wary of the country’s instability and others eager to exploit its vulnerability. In addition to the 4,400 Americans who died, tens of thousands have been severely wounded and their continued care must remain a national priority in the U.S. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis also perished and 20 per cent of that country’s population at the start of the war are now refugees or internally displaced persons, unable to return home. Meanwhile, instead of a “beacon of democracy” we see a dysfunctional political order that cannot so easily have closure or implement the results of an election that took place more than six months ago. The nation responsible for this calamity, America, will continue to have a role in Iraq’s future. The US vice president Joseph Biden was right when he noted that “American engagement with Iraq will continue” with a new mission to help the country through reconstruction and reconciliation. And the story doesn’t end there. At some point in history those who brought this disaster down on us all must be called to account for the fabrications, the embarrassment to America’s honour, and the death and waste of so many lives. Until that occurs, the conclusion to this sad chapter will not have been written. *Published in the UAE-based THE NATIONAL on Sept. 5, 2010.James Zogby is president of the Arab American Institute.

 

 

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Robert Grenier deconstructs the political rhetoric of former United States ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk.   By Robert Grenier   The latest piece of ‘analysis’ of the misnamed Israeli-Palestinian ‘peace process’ from Martin Indyk, recently aired by the New York Times Op-Ed page, simply leaves me slack-jawed. On the surface, Martin’s views appear to be the soul of pedestrian reasonableness. Cutting across the grain of current informed opinion, the former stalwart of the powerful pro-Israeli (one might more accurately say pro-Likud) US lobbying juggernaut AIPAC lists four reasons why we should be optimistic about the prospects for the direct peace talks in which Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas finally has been coerced into participating. Flawed reasoning First, says Martin, terrorist violence against Israel has diminished considerably. Second, Israeli settlement activity “has slowed significantly”. Third, he points out, the public on both sides “supports a two-state solution”. And finally, after nearly two decades of on-and-off Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, he says, the broad outlines of a solution are already well-known: It’s just a matter of summoning the political will on both sides to see it through – and the talks in prospect will at least put both sides to the test. Again, seemingly all quite reasonable. If this analysis were submitted by some college sophomore, I’d give him a ritual grade of B-plus and send him on his way. But this is not just some undergraduate: This is Martin Indyk, former senior US official and prominent member of the American peace-process gang responsible, collectively, for the abject failure of American-sponsored Mideast peace-making during the one period – the 1990s – when a just peace might have been achieved. Their failure was not so much the result of incompetence, but of duplicity: For a just peace serving the long term interests of the US (and, ironically, of the Israelis as well) was never their intent – pleasing Israeli leaders and their slavish US supporters was. Unlike our humble undergraduate, therefore, Martin knows better. The fact that he still purveys pious nonsense regarding the peace process calls his motives once more into question, and a brief examination of his views serves to explain why he and his comrades – the Dennis Rosses, the Aaron Millers, the Dan Kurtzers and a few others – somehow managed, on behalf of their political masters, not only to preclude any possibility of a just peace in the Middle East, but to undermine the long-term security of both Israel and the US in the process. Settlement semantics Let’s begin with settlements. There is no other issue which so invites mendacity and obfuscation, and Martin is as adept as anyone. My favourite this time is Indyk’s assertion that due to the (again misnamed) Israeli settlement ‘moratorium’, “no new housing starts in the West bank were reported by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics in the first quarter of this year”. Gosh, what an interesting factoid. Of course, a count of housing starts in the West Bank would exclude areas illegally and unilaterally annexed by Israel, wouldn’t it? And let’s not even begin to try to ferret out what constitutes a “housing start” in the estimation of the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics. But beyond that, what’s so magical about the first quarter of this year? By my calculation, we’re in the third quarter of the year; is there some reason to ignore what’s been happening since March? But there’s more. As Martin breathlessly reports, there have been “hardly any” – a shockingly imprecise formulation from someone so practiced in the art of fine parsing – new housing projects (not “starts” this time, but entire projects!) since … well, since the huge diplomatic row caused by Israel’s announcement of 1,600 additional residential units in East Jerusalem during a visit by Joe Biden, which occurred in – well, come to think of it, that was in the first quarter of this year, wasn’t it? One wonders if construction of those new housing units has started yet. Downturn in demolitions Finally, we are told, the demolition of Palestinian houses in East Jerusalem “is also down” compared to recent years. That’s rather like praising someone for beating his wife less frequently. From all this, Martin would have us believe that the current moment is propitious for peacemaking. At least Martin has the grace to admit that the settlement moratorium-in-name-only, due to expire on September 26, “seems unlikely” (nice bit of understatement, that) to be extended by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, and of course Mahmoud Abbas has declared his intention to withdraw from negotiations if and when the ‘moratorium’ ends. Martin’s got a nifty compromise, though: Perhaps Netanyahu could restrict building “to ‘modest growth’ in the settlement blocs that will most likely be absorbed into Israel in the final agreement”. And that would be the whole point of these ‘negotiations,’ wouldn’t it? It is only the Obama White House which wants these negotiations, and their point would be to provide the illusion of progress – a perceived necessity, given the extravagance of President Obama’s early pretensions as a Middle East peacemaker. Necessary irritant The price of cooperation in this charade for the Israelis is that they be allowed to continue to build, and thus to further consolidate the unilaterally-imposed settlement first conceived and initiated by Ariel Sharon in 2005. Netanyahu is not about to let progress toward that goal be impeded by negotiations; those negotiations, at worst, are just a necessary irritant to be borne while he moves forward to seize what he wants. That’s a deal the US administration is quite willing to accept. The Palestinians know this, which accounts for their extreme reluctance to play along with these negotiations in the first place. And Martin knows it as well as anyone. Indyk is right that the public on both sides supports a two-state solution, which makes the current situation all the more tragic. While Martin would like to pretend that Netanyahu is motivated to work against the prevailing anti-two-state sentiment within his own Likud Party, he clearly is not – whatever he might say. On those rare occasions when Netanyahu can bring himself to form the words “Palestinian state,” one can fairly hear the wheels turning in his head: What he means when he says the words is that if the Palestinians should wish to call a chain of non-contiguous, demilitarised Bantustans on the remaining land Israel has elected not to annex a “state,” they are welcome to do so, no matter how distasteful the sound. And of course, none of this involves Gaza, which is to remain what it is now: A vast prison camp. Martin Indyk would have us believe that all that stands in the way of a viable peace between Israelis and Palestinians – the broad outlines of which, he correctly points out, are already well-known – is for both Netanyahu and his Palestinian counterpart to summon the necessary “willpower” to bring it about. Binyamin Netanyahu may lack many things, but willpower is not one of them. The notion that Netanyahu is secretly wishing he could embrace a compromise solution which would involve dismantling a significant number of West Bank settlements and accepting some form of shared sovereignty in East Jerusalem is simply ludicrous. He has always made clear he would never do so. Why would he do so now? To please President Obama? No, Netanyahu has no end of willpower – and what he wills is far removed from the type of agreement past negotiations suggest might be marginally acceptable to the Palestinians. Duplicitous diplomacy Which brings us back to Martin Indyk. No one understands the above better than he. He knows Netanyahu’s thoughts and intentions better than I could ever hope to. He knows fully and well that the prospective direct talks are going nowhere – hence his disingenuous final coda, that we should “suspend disbelief” and “welcome the fact that American diplomacy has ensured (Israeli and Palestinian leaders) will soon be put to the test”. Yes, they will be put to the test, and we already know the outcome. The only conceivable explanation for his mendacity, apart from the desire to see his name in print, is that Martin is continuing to promote the type of ‘American diplomacy’ he championed during his years in the Clinton administration – diplomacy designed to keep pressure off the Israelis while they do whatever they please. Although he doubtless had to make some accommodations along the way in transitioning from an overt lobbyist on behalf of Israel to a foreign-policy apparatchik in the Clinton administration, one always assumed that his basic motives were unchanged. In those years, he had a lot of company, the redoubtable Dennis Ross being most prominent, and most disingenuous, among them. At least Aaron Miller, another of the state department peace-process team members, has had the good grace since his retirement to admit that he and the others saw their role as acting as “Israel’s lawyers”. For those of us who watched the process from close range in those years, it was obvious that Ross, Indyk and the others saw their jobs as consisting of a two-part process: Find out what the Israelis want, and then help them get it. In this, they could never have succeeded in doing the harm they did on their own. After all, they were merely apparatchiks – viziers serving at the behest of a series of politically craven administrations, of which the current one is merely the latest. But for those of us who spent our careers trying to protect and defend a country whose security was being systematically and gratuitously undermined by the likes of Martin Indyk, this latest bit of cynical posturing in the New York Times is a lot to swallow. I don’t know who Martin thinks he’s fooling, but I can assure you he’s not fooling us. Robert Grenier was the CIA’s chief of station in Islamabad, Pakistan, from 1999 to 2002. He was also the director of the CIA’s counter-terrorism centre. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

 

(Source: Aljazeera.net le 5 septembre 2010) Lien: : http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2010/09/201094155358615769.html  

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