French government overwhelmed by school knife attacks
No knives were confiscated by gendarmes during two surprise searches that were carried out in recent weeks around the Françoise-Dolto middle school, in the eastern French town of Nogent. Yet it was on the sidelines of one of these operations that a pupil fatally stabbed a 31-year-old teaching assistant, on Tuesday, June 10. Faced with this tragedy, teachers, educational staff and parents mourned a new stabbing attack committed in a school, and many expressed bitterness. On April 24, a student at a Catholic high school in the western city of Nantes killed a classmate and wounded three others with a knife, and similar attacks have followed over recent months. On Wednesday, the education minister called for a minute of silence to be held in all schools, at noon on June 12.
Faced with widespread shock and excessive security rhetoric from factions on the right and the far right, the government has been searching for ways to prevent these attacks. Yet their solutions have, so far, proven ineffective to secure all of France's 12 million students and 1.2 million educational staff members. The June 10 stabbing has, once again, proven that all educational institutions, from private high schools in city centers to rural middle schools, could be struck by such violent acts – even those not identified as being "at risk."
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