Protests from unions, teachers, and students over the quality and state of schools in France have since devolved into riots by students – happening across much of the whole nation of France. On a single day alone last week, the Interior Ministry of France reported that 1,949 students were arrested, and 305 police officers were being treated for injuries. At the plethora of schools across the country, it is commonplace for trash cans to be set on fire by students. In one such instance last week, a trash fire led to the entrance to the Nelson Mandela School being overtaken in a blaze. Another horrifying moment was when firefighters showed up to a school, only for hundreds of students to surround the fire truck, then, after forcing the firefighters to flee, set it on fire. 

One French student who gave reasoning for the anger to Reuters said, “There are no windows. In the prefab toilets there’s no water. There are cockroaches and rats everywhere in the school. The school canteen (cafeteria) is too expensive. There is no toilet paper in the toilets, and we need to go and ask school supervisors to get some. The buildings are dilapidated: in winter, in the prefab classrooms it’s too cold (23 degrees Fahrenheit), and in the summer it’s too hot (105 degrees Fahrenheit).” 

When researching this, there were other students who confirmed these sentiments, as well as classrooms being vastly overcrowded, long wait times for bathrooms, poor oversight/supervision/protection by and from adults, and too few teachers. 

France is in part facing this problem because, like most governments in the world, they have been mismanaging money. If I recall, it was two years ago or so that they faced other protests, due to the government trying to lower pension sizes – because they simply didn’t have the money, nor the future tax income to cover it. The French rioted, forcing the government to reverse its course and to continue to borrow billions from banks to meet the continually growing deficit. In the meantime, the schools and schoolchildren have clearly been suffering in detestable conditions. 

At what point does a nation decide that they need to fix something? As with education: is it only when conditions have become so untenable that your teachers stage walkouts and their unions protest? When children have been given over to the State, and the parents say: 

“Here, teach my child, give them all that they need to overcome adversities in life – but you may not punish them – and I have no time for it, either. Also, I will vote to pay less taxes.” 

And the State says: “Give us your tax money, and we will feed it to the oligarchs and administrators, and spend it on new stadiums, rather than new classrooms and teachers.” 

Surely I do not condone setting firetrucks on fire! That was certainly too far and too much.

But how long should a person have to suffer before they need to stand up and say no more? And if standing still in protest does no good? At some point, surely, Young America herself had to rage and rage and wage a war to be free and heard by her previous overlord. 

And how will schools in the United States handle their own overcrowding, their own underfunding of teachers? How long will our students remain subdued? Even when I was a child, I distinctly recall conversations of classrooms getting too big, teachers becoming poorer. There was a fantastic science teacher who taught me in high school who always seemed rested and happy. When we asked him why, he told us that his lung-surgeon wife had bought him a new boat. 

He was absolutely an outlier. 

Since 1960, there has been approximately a 142% increase in the price of a median-value house relative to a teacher’s annual salary. (1960: a teacher’s salary was $5,276, while the median home value was $11,900. Today the salary for a teacher is $76,320, while a home is roughly ~$414,900). If we do not pay our teachers well, we as a civilization will occasionally have the fortunate or wealthy educator who needs not for money and can focus slowly on his or her aim, but mostly we will have the desperate and the eventually dog-tired in those roles. 

In Marcus Aurelius’s famous Meditations, he thanked many people at the start of it, 

“From my great-grandfather, to have benefited from good teachers at home, and to have come to realize that this is a matter on which one should spare no expense.” 

France’s education woes are coming to a head. Too overburdened, too underfunded, too few teachers paid too little, with not enough oversight for students. 

Could I replace “France" with " America” in the previous line and have it still be true? Or is it at the very least a portend of the future? 

I offer no fixes, as anything that I recommend might seem like I have the answer, and you, Dear Reader, may not need to attend to the issue as “others are working on it." If this issue is identified by you as an important one, I would rather you dream up a fix, because then the proverbial ‘ball’ isn’t ‘kicked down the road’. As it is on me, so too is it on you. 

Our world was handed to us by the lazy, unsighted, incompetent, and those too tired to care, as it was for them, too. 

Austin Petak is an aspiring novelist and freelance journalist who loves seeking stories and the quiet passions of the soul. If you are interested in reaching out to him to cover a story, you may find him at austinpetak@gmail.com.