Fear the Day When Young People Will No Longer Believe It's Worth Rebelling

When a school is on fire, everyone suddenly becomes an expert on education. The minister will talk about public order, television and the media will replay the flames endlessly, and the public will be handed a simple, immediate moral task: be horrified. It is much harder to look at a fire that has been burning for years, without smoke or sirens.

Absolutely, the French students deserve our support. So do their very real and important demands. That does not, of course, mean supporting the burning of schools, cars or buses. A burned-down school is not a liberated school, and an injured teacher is not a symbol of revolution. But condemning violence is not the same thing as understanding what happened. Around 400 French educational institutions remained closed after protests triggered by shortages of substitute teachers, deteriorating buildings and poor conditions. Violence did break out, as it so often does in France, but it is neither the entire movement nor the whole story.

Blaming an agitator is cheaper than fixing a school

The French authorities have already reached for a familiar explanation. There is a violent minority, some of its members may not even be students, and the so-called "radical left" may be behind it all. Perhaps there really are organised groups taking advantage of the protests. Political parties rarely miss an opportunity to climb aboard someone else’s anger and then claim they invented it. But a provocateur can set fire to a rubbish bin. They cannot invent the teacher who has been missing for months, the wall that is falling apart, or the feeling that children from poorer neighbourhoods have long been treated as a budgetary inconvenience.

Blaming an agitator is much cheaper than fixing a school. Once a social problem is translated into the language of public order, the solution becomes wonderfully simple. More police, more cameras, more arrests. The Ministry of Education can temporarily behave like a branch office of the Interior Ministry, while the question of why students took to the streets disappears behind the question of who threw the first stone.

A generation educated about the disasters waiting for it

A school for the literate, disciplined and loyal subject

And this brings us to the uncomfortable question of school itself. Some will tell you that the modern education system was created in imperial Germany to produce obedient workers. The history is somewhat more complicated, though not much more comforting. Important roots of state-run mass education reach back to the Prussia of Frederick the Great, whose General School Regulations were introduced in 1763, more than a century before the German Empire was founded. The objective was not merely to produce workers. Above all, the state needed a literate, disciplined and loyal subject.

American political scientist Agustina Paglayan has shown in her research on the spread of mass education that governments often expanded schooling after rebellions and periods of social unrest. School was not simply a place for transmitting knowledge, but also for teaching obedience, respect for the law and acceptance of the existing order. Democracy, equality and social mobility often arrived later, if they were invited at all.

That does not mean public education is one great conspiracy against the free mind. It brought literacy to millions of people, opened doors that had previously been reserved for the wealthy, and allowed children to escape lives that had once been predetermined by birth. That is precisely why its failures today are so painful. Curricula have changed, yet the deep grammar of schooling has proved remarkably resistant. The same rhythm for everyone, a bell that interrupts thought, a grade delivered like a verdict, and the reproduction of content as the main proof that learning has taken place.

School was not designed as a copy of the factory, but educational and industrial discipline quickly recognised themselves in each other. The body must be in the right place at the right time. The task must be completed according to instructions. Authority asks the question, and the subordinate is expected to produce the answer that authority already knows. Such a system can produce excellent students. It is much less capable of recognising a child who thinks differently.

An uninterested student therefore easily becomes a "bad student." Their boredom is treated as a character flaw, although sometimes it may actually be feedback about what we are offering them. Of course school cannot turn every lesson into a spectacle, nor can children learn only what already interests them. But there is an enormous difference between the discipline required for learning and a system that has turned indifference to learning into the normal state of affairs.

Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than in the way literature is taught. A student is asked who said what, when a certain character appeared, and through questions like these we try to establish whether the book was really read. Much less often do we ask whether the book disturbed them, changed them, or forced them to see the world through someone else’s eyes. The system checks whether the student has stored the book in memory. It almost seems impolite to ask whether the book has entered the student. According to the 2025 PISA results, as many as 26 percent of French students said school had been a waste of time, compared with an OECD average of four percent. That does not prove they learned nothing there. It shows that school failed to explain why what they were learning deserved their time.

The teacher as educator, psychologist, administrator and security guard

A society defending an empty fortress

And then there is militarisation. Perhaps defence is necessary. The world did not become harmless simply because we would rather spend money on libraries. But a budget is always a moral document as well. A continent that can rapidly summon political urgency for tanks, drones and air defence, while endlessly searching for "fiscal space" to provide smaller classes and substitute teachers, is sending young people a very precise message about its priorities. A society capable of defending its borders but incapable of offering a future ultimately finds itself defending an empty fortress.

So let us imagine the schools of the future, except in the present. Smaller classes in which the adult at the front actually knows the children sitting before them. Teachers who are well paid and freed from bureaucracy masquerading as accountability. A school that does not force a choice between technology and the arts, but shows why human beings need both. A school that develops practical independence, intellectual scepticism and emotional resilience. Not as three more subjects and six new forms to complete, but as an entirely different idea of what it means to be an educated human being.

In a paradoxical turn, French students may now be holding one of their most powerful lessons in citizenship outside the locked doors of their schools. They are learning how to organise, how to speak in their own name, and how to turn individual frustration into a collective demand. A violent minority can rob them of legitimacy, just as the state can try to rob them of their voice by reducing the entire movement to that minority. Both should be rejected.

We older people like to grant the young permission to rebel, provided their rebellion is quiet, orderly and over before the rush hour begins. We recognise anger only once it no longer inconveniences anyone. But by then it is no longer anger. It is an extracurricular activity approved by the headteacher.

There is no need to romanticise the fire. We should ask why we ignored the smoke for so long. We have failed young people by leaving them schools from the past, threats from the future and very little of the present that truly belongs to them. So we should not be surprised that they are angry. We should be surprised that we expected them to remain silent for so long — and fear the day when they no longer believe that even rebellion is worth the effort.