It is generally acknowledged that schools have a right to determine standards of dress and behaviour of pupils. I'm guessing most of us have transgressed the standards of our schools at some stage, and we may certainly disagree as to what should be acceptable and what shouldn't; but I think most of us would acknowledge that schools have a right to determine what is acceptable, and to enforce it. (Why schools feel the need to do so is a separate debate; keeping the focus on education, by eliminating distractions and adolescent preening competitions, separation into clans etc. are some of the common ones.)

In this light, I submit that it is not necessary to overload the issue with questions about alleged colonialist, racist, islamophobic or anti-woman motives which might have contributed to the ban. Occam's razor applies. Headscarves were seen as divisive and leading to segregation; this was reason enough.

Public schools in France are the essence of the Jacobin state; egalitarian and homogenising by vocation. I may add that I'm not entirely happy about this historical fact; but it was not constructed against any particular group, neither Bretons, Corsicans, Occitan dialect-speaking peasant children, or the children of North African immigrants. It's just the nature of the beast.

Now obviously, when you have a highly-centralized system which diffuses ill-defined rules about the dress code, and it falls to the heads of high schools to apply them, then all sorts of shit happens. Latent colonialist, racist, islamophobic or anti-woman attitudes may come to the fore. This is not evidence that these were the motives for the rule. It is evidence that the French education system is deeply dysfunctional, and that people are, for the most part, human.

This is tough for adolescents who may wish, or be expected by their family, to cover their hair at all times in public. But it's not a personal attack, nor is it an attack on their culture or their religion. It's the rule. And schools have rules.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}