Paris Announces Plan to Promote Secular Values

PARIS — Officials in France announced new measures on Thursday aimed at reinforcing secular values at French schools, after the terrorist attacks in and around Paris exposed serious cultural rifts between children in heavily immigrant communities and others in classrooms throughout the country.

Teachers are to receive new training, students would be exposed more deeply to civics and morals lessons, and classroom activities would include the singing of “La Marseillaise.”

The measures were devised to counter rampant “conspiracy theories” at French schools, the education minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, said at a news conference Thursday. She said the issues had become apparent when some students refused to observe a moment of silence in schools after the attacks, which left 17 people dead.

French schools already have a secular code of conduct, but about 1,000 teachers and staff members would be trained on questions of “laïcité,” France’s secular identity, codified under a century-old law on the separation of church and state. She promised that a day devoted to secular laws would be celebrated once a year in every school.

Ms. Vallaud-Belkacem also said that, starting in September, a new program of “moral and civic training” for students would include lessons on how to fight racism, anti-Semitism and “any form of discrimination.”

The government’s objective, she said, is to “re-establish” the authority of teachers, many of whom said they were shocked and uncertain about how to react following about 200 incidents in French schools after the attacks. Some of the acts involved “glorifying terrorism,” Ms. Vallaud-Belkacem told the National Assembly in a speech earlier this month.

Éric Bettancourt, a schoolteacher in Clichy-sous-Bois, a heavily immigrant suburb, told the France 2 television channel that three quarters of his students had refused to observe the moment of silence. “The first shocking words I heard were that the murders were justified,” Mr. Bettancourt said. “They considered that it was forbidden to make blasphemies or insult the prophet through drawings or speech.”

Ms. Vallaud-Belkacem said that such conduct would not be allowed. “Any behavior which will question the values of the republic and the authority” of the teacher, she said, “will be systematically signaled to the school principal” and followed by an “educational dialogue with parents.”

Students will also have classes in “media education” to help them distinguish between “what is and what isn’t information,” Mrs. Vallaud-Belkacem said.

The government will invest 71 million euros — about $80 million — for 2015 and 250 million over the next three years on the measures.

“Teachers were unprepared and didn’t often find the words to confront students who criticized Charlie Hebdo,” said Bernadette Groison, the general secretary of the Fédération Syndicale Unitaire, the main civil servants’ union.