PANTIN, France—Every Sunday, parents in this working-class neighborhood just north of Paris bring their children to a small school operated by the local mosque. Half of the three-hour lesson is devoted to learning Arabic, the other half to learning the Quran.

Now President Emmanuel Macron’s government is considering giving parents a secular alternative to that intertwining of Arabic and Islam by prodding more of France’s public schools to offer children as young as age 6 Arabic lessons—without religious content.

France is home to one of the world’s biggest Arab diasporas, but only a fraction of the country’s public schools have the resources to offer Arabic courses. Instead, tens of thousands of children attend classes partly funded by Arabic-speaking countries, according to the government. Countless others attend private schools linked to mosques, where instruction ranges between teachers with a clear command of Arabic and those who don’t fully understand the language and encourage rote memorization of Quranic verses.

The idea of teaching Arabic across the public school system touches a nerve in France, a country that jealously guards the classroom as an incubator for its particular brand of colorblind, religion-free republicanism. The first public spaces where France banned the wearing of headscarves were its schools for fear the Muslim garb was blurring the country’s strict separation of church and state.

“We’ve made Arabic into an object of fear and now people in France struggle to see it as something positive,” said Karima Taibi, 32, who shuttles her 9-year-old daughter to private Arabic classes twice a week at a cost of €250 ($288) a year.