Alexander Hurst writes:

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 may 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.”

But 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 OECD 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 over 30 today; 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, told me that staff shortages were the fault of “low salaries and poor treatment.” She has to commute for an 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 €2100 (£1,780) a month, plus some overtime pay. Teachers’ salaries in France are only 56% of what they are in Germany – even as over €200bn 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. [Continue reading…]