France is now watching its lycées become battlegrounds. What began with complaints about overcrowded classrooms, missing teachers, deteriorating buildings and an education system increasingly incapable of delivering what it promises has spread across the country. Hundreds of schools have been disrupted or closed, thousands arrested, and the confrontation between students and police has become increasingly violent.
The violence is unacceptable. Burning schools, attacking teachers or police, destroying public property and turning anger into collective stupidity does not make a political argument stronger. It makes it easier for governments to avoid answering the political argument altogether.
And that is precisely the danger. Because beneath the fires, barricades and tear gas is a much more uncomfortable reality: these teenagers are not protesting because they suddenly discovered rebellion. They are protesting because they have discovered that the adults running the country have stopped listening.
For years, Western governments have perfected the language of educational modernisation. There are platforms, reforms, digital strategies, performance indicators, consultations, assessments, restructuring programmes and beautifully designed PowerPoint presentations about the school of tomorrow. What there is increasingly less of is the school of today.
A teenager does not care about the government's vocabulary of optimisation when there is no teacher in the classroom. A student does not care about administrative reform when thirty or forty pupils are squeezed into a room that should accommodate half that number.
And a young person certainly does not care about another ministerial promise about the future when the ceiling leaks, the equipment does not work and the teacher who was supposed to prepare them for an examination has been absent for months.
This is where educational technocracy collapses. Governments have become extraordinarily good at measuring education while becoming increasingly bad at providing it. They measure attendance, performance, inclusion, digitalisation and competitiveness. They produce statistics about social mobility while children themselves experience immobility. They speak about preparing young people for tomorrow while failing to provide them with a functional classroom today.
That contradiction eventually produces anger. And teenagers have one political advantage over adults: they have not yet learned the respectable vocabulary of resignation. Trade unions negotiate. Professionals issue statements. Parents complain politely. Teachers write letters. Opposition parties hold conferences. Teenagers blockade the school gate.
It is crude, inconvenient and sometimes dangerous. But it is also brutally direct. The French state should therefore be careful about treating this exclusively as a policing problem. Once a government starts seeing students primarily through the lens of public order, it has already lost the educational argument.
The real question is not why teenagers are angry. The real question is why the state needed teenagers to become angry before it noticed that something was broken. France is not alone in this. Across Europe, public services are being squeezed between fiscal discipline, demographic pressure, political theatre and the fantasy that technology can compensate for missing human beings. Teachers become numbers on spreadsheets. Nurses become staffing ratios. Schools become buildings to be managed rather than institutions to be protected.
Then politicians act surprised when citizens stop believing them. The French lycée crisis is therefore bigger than France and bigger than education. It is a warning about what happens when a generation concludes that the social contract is written for everyone except them.
These teenagers are supposed to become tomorrow's citizens. Instead, they are learning today's lesson: when institutions stop listening, people start shouting. And when even the children have to shout loud enough to be heard, the problem is no longer with the children. It is with the state.
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