France’s students feel disowned

• By Alexander Hurst / The Guardian

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When adolescents protest that the government is failing to uphold their right to an education and the government’s response is to send in riot police, the government has lost the plot. People outside France might have spent the past week watching the student protests in Paris and other cities, and thought: “Well, France has a long tradition of insurrection” or “That’s just the French being French.”

However, the situation that has provoked the high-school walkouts and teenage anger is most likely not one they would immediately associate with the France of their imaginations.

In place of its lost plot, the French government has a collection of anecdotes and statistics that it should be ashamed of: 27th place in the most recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development education rankings; schools with ceilings collapsing and rats in classrooms, and, in a school in Bagnolet, no drinkable water; an increase in the average number of students per class from 27 in 2010 to more than 30 today; and half of primary and high schools missing teachers at the start of the school year — many of them with no substitutes or replacements.

Julie, a 34-year-old teacher who joined the demonstrations, said that staff shortages were the fault of “low salaries and poor treatment.” She has to commute for 1 hour and 45 minutes each way between Paris and the school on the city’s outskirts where she accepted a post last year after switching careers — all for 2,100 euros (US$2,353) a month, plus some overtime pay. Teachers’ salaries in France are only 56 percent of what they are in Germany — even as more than 200 billion euros in public subsidies finds its way annually to businesses.

So it could easily have been a teacher-led revolt; instead, the high-schoolers themselves cracked first.

They paid a high price for refusing to accept a failing education system: a 16-year-old has lost the use of an eye, a 15-year-old has lost a hand, a 14-year-old has a broken jaw — all from police munitions. Hundreds more have been injured in some way. In total, 4,400 people, the vast majority minors, have been arrested in a little more than a week, almost half the number of arrests made during the months of yellow vest protests from 2018 to 2020.

It might be incoherent that protesting students shoot fireworks at high-school buildings, while at the same time denouncing the poor facilities they have to study in. However, the far greater incoherence belongs to a government that has disinvested in its youth, and has chosen to answer garbage fires with police charges.

“Sure some people were burning trash cans,” said Fatoumata Sylla Wague, a 17-year-old in her final year at the Lycee Paul Eluard in Seine-Saint-Denis, where pupils were among the first to set up blockades outside their campus. “But trash cans can’t feel anything.”

On the other hand, she and her fellow students certainly felt the tear gas that the police launched in response.

Despite “unlivable” temperatures in the school buildings, extreme heat and extreme cold, walls covered in mold, electricity cuts and often not enough tables or chairs for everyone, Sylla Wague would rather have been in class than out braving the riot police.

However, she wants to teach history some day and felt compelled, in a moment in history, comparable with May 1968, to take part.

“If I’m fighting for our rights today, it’s because I really want to teach, but in good conditions, and so this is for the next generation of students and teachers,” she said.

I cannot imagine how hard it must be to be a teenager in general today. In 2021, The Lancet found that 75 percent of French 16-to-25-year-olds exhibited signs of “eco-anxiety,” telling researchers they were “frightened” about the future. In France and beyond, students and young workers actively dislike artificial intelligence and feel pessimistic about the future it portends.

As for Sylla Wague, she worries about the rise of far-right political movements, in France and elsewhere.

For years, successive French governments have dealt with problems in some of France’s most troubled urban areas by unleashing heavy-handed policing that all too frequently targets young people with random checks that can be personally degrading.

Centralized policymaking has also produced a national education system that often sends its least experienced teachers to these same areas, while granting more senior teachers priority in requesting transfers to other, less difficult, schools.

A far-right government, the kind Sylla Wague said she worries about, would almost certainly ramp up these kinds of tensions. Already, in response to the protests, right-wing politicians have called for harsher sentences and more law and order, but this is not a problem that will be solved with more police and more batons, any more than it already has been.

Because none of it signals a government that truly wants to listen — it signals that society at large does not really claim these places, or these teenagers, as its own. On n’est pas mal eduque, on n’est pas ecoute (“We’re not poorly educated; we’re just not being listened to”), read one sign brandished at Paris’ Place de la Republique on Tuesday last week.

Responding to the crisis is going to require some tangible acts, such as upgrading dilapidated facilities. Arnaud Richards, 50, head of student services at Iqbal Masih middle school in Saint-Denis, offered the example of how thoughtful architecture could have more impact than one might expect.

The technical high school he previously worked in — Gabriel Peri, in an extremely poor area — reopened in 2022 after a total reconstruction, which, Richards said led to a calmer climate for students and teachers.

“Having the school itself be a beautiful place made the community feel more respected,” he said.

However, a real answer does not stop with better facilities. Showing up to cut ribbons on new construction, or renovations, isn’t enough. During French President Emmanuel Macron’s decade in power, his government has, on any number of issues, successively failed to listen in a way that makes people feel deeply seen and heard.

“Honestly, I don’t think the government cares, they just want to shut us up with false promises. We know nothing will change, because the government doesn’t listen to us,” Sylla Wague said.

Of all the things going wrong for France at the moment, this underlying lack of a feeling of “togetherness,” the feeling that nobody is really listening, is going to be the most difficult to deal with.

Alexander Hurst writes for Guardian Europe from Paris. He is the author of Generation Desperation.