In recent weeks, much of the debate in France has fallen into a binary of “Je Suis Charlie” — “I Am Charlie,” the shorthand for defenders of liberty of expression — and “I Am Not Charlie,” those who find offense in the cartoons that satirized the prophet Mohammed, but who generally don’t condone the killings.

Many teachers see that divide as troubling. “What poses problems to teachers and students and France itself is, can we be something else other than Charlie or not Charlie?” said Mathilde Levesque, a high school teacher in Aulnay-sous-Bois, another working-class suburb of Paris. “The problem is much more vast, and it’s not new,” she added.

After the attacks, Ms. Levesque said that some students were upset that the outpouring of support for free speech seemed to run up against their disapproval of the caricatures of Mohammed. “They said, ‘We were already the forgotten of the sociopolitical system, and now they trampled on our values.’”

French news reports often cite teachers who say they face similar resistance from Muslim students when they teach about the Holocaust. Such instances have contributed to unease among Jews in France, though Dominique Trimbur, the director of education at the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, which supports Holocaust survivors, said he believed the vast majority of schools had no trouble teaching the Holocaust.

More often, teachers say they encounter young minds asking the same difficult questions the rest of the country is facing: Why can’t I wear a head scarf in school, but I can on a school trip? (Because France’s 2004 law forbids conspicuous religious symbols inside public primary and secondary schools.) Why is it O.K. for Charlie Hebdo to print cartoons satirizing the prophet, but the comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala is on trial for hate speech?

Mr. M’Bala M’Bala, who has a huge following among young people in France, is standing trial for remarks he made in 2013 lamenting that a prominent Jewish journalist did not die “in the gas chambers.” The comedian was detained and released last month after saying on his Twitter feed, “I feel like Charlie Coulibaly,” comments prosecutors said indicated sympathy with Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who killed four hostages at a kosher supermarket in Paris.