ABSTRACT
In France, the schooling policy of the migrants’ children was drawn up in the early 1970s, due to the major changes in the influx context; the labour force flows during the years of economic expansion had transformed into a flow of families mainly of Algerian, Moroccan and Turkish origins. This policy, then called ‘The Schooling of Migrant Children’, aimed at integrating these children into French schools while maintaining their ‘cultures of origin’. However, since the early 1980s, it was deemed necessary that this policy have new targets. Jacques Berque, a professor in the prestigious Collège de France, was commissioned by the minister of National Education in 1985 to report on this matter. He argued the need of a new political project for school and society, one which would be able to ‘solidarize the presences’, according to his words, and which would recognize the new ‘Islamic-Mediterranean dimension of France’ (Berque 1985).1
