MARSEILLE, FRANCE, September 29, 2008 At St. Mauront Catholic School, 80 percent of the students are Muslim. “There is respect for our religion here,” one girl explains. “In the public school, I would not be allowed to wear a veil.”
France has only four Muslim schools, and some of the country’s 8,847 Roman Catholic schools have become refuges for Muslims seeking high academic standards and a spiritual environment in which good manners are also valued.
Educators estimate that Muslim students now make up more than 10 percent of the two million students in Catholic schools. In ethnically mixed neighborhoods in Marseille and the industrial north, the proportion can be more than half. The quiet migration of Muslims to private Catholic schools highlights how hard it has become for state schools, long Frances tool for integration, to keep their promise of equal opportunity.