French school protests: a rite of passage – and the result of genuine concerns

Across France, school students have taken to the streets to protest about teacher shortages, dilapidated school buildings and long school days.

While the tradition of student protest has long roots in France, the country’s current fiscal crisis combined with entrenched structural problems with teacher recruitment, sickness absence and a backlog of school maintenance means this is unlikely to be something the current government can easily address.

Problems – and protests – regarding conditions in French schools go back decades.

I’ve spent 20 years conducting research in France and protest has been a recurring theme. Many research participants I’ve worked with have spoken with fondness about protesting as high school students.

One participant in Nanterre, who went on to become a community activist, repeatedly spoke about how schools in poor Paris suburbs were institutions that would “crush you”. This was due in part to French educational culture, but also because of their under-resourcing and poor state of repair. To them protest felt like an outlet for these grievances.

Another participant described protesting against a lack of teachers in their high school with their classmates in Marseille in the 1980s. They were kettled – held tightly in a group by a circle of police. This was their first real experience of the muscular law enforcement that is often used in response to protest in France. This had a lasting effect on their opinion of not just law enforcement specifically, but of state power more generally.

These two examples illustrate sentiments that are repeated across France. They also give some context to the ongoing school protests. There are longstanding grievances over how education is funded and resourced. What’s more, for many people school demonstrations are a key part of the formation of their role as citizen-protestors.

The establishment of the citizen-protestor also happens within school itself. Teaching of the history of the revolution of 1789 pitches it as the birth of a modern world of freedom, democracy and human rights. There’s little discussion of the bloodshed, upheaval and the lack of the implementation of these principles for France’s colonial subjects. Protest is presented as not just a civil right to be exercised, but as part of a broader arc of the history of the Republic.

The current protests also need to be understood from a structural perspective. France is a cultural paradox when it comes to education. Intellectuals and intellectualism is celebrated in a way difficult to imagine in the English-speaking world. Some of the most popular primetime TV shows revolve around intellectual debates between scholars, journalists and politicians. But this cultural value placed on intellectualism is not reflected in the funding and resourcing of French schools and universities.

France, on paper, spends around the OECD average on schools, but this obscures an accounting method which counts pensions in education expenditure. Pensions account for 32% of total expenditure.

This a product of the broader problems in public finance France has faced for several decades and which have become even more prominent in the past year.