The scale of protests raging across France over the education system, attracting hundreds of thousands of pupils, teachers and parents, has been described as exceptional by unions and student movement organisers. The student protests at Paris universities nearly five decades ago were initially driven by opposition to an outdated and overcrowded system, limited opportunities and broader political concerns. The unrest soon spread beyond campuses, expanding into nationwide strikes involving millions of workers that virtually paralysed the country.
Back then, President Charles de Gaulle was in power. Today’s protests come as France heads into next year’s presidential elections, which are being eyed by the far right. As in 1968, the protests that started on September 21 at an underdeveloped Paris suburban high school are about funding for education, teacher shortages, overcrowded classes, and school facilities.
But those are triggers and not the deeper causes, according to historians and student movement organisers. You can see they are bombarded daily with economic problems, political extremes, dangers of warfare in Europe, the threat to their careers from AI, high youth unemployment rates, the climate crisis,” Andrew Smith, historian of modern France and lecturer in Liberal Arts at Queen Mary University of London, told Al Jazeera. He said students are dissatisfied because of a lack of substantive interaction between the government and student representatives and unions in recent years.
Robi Morder, a researcher on social movements in France, said the lack of communication reflects the current government’s approach. Some of the ministers had been in the youth movement. So when there was an issue, the government knew how to negotiate.
In 1990, the president himself received a delegation of students,” said Morder. The government’s first answer is, ‘It is nothing; we will call the police, and everything will be OK.’” Student organisers say they are frustrated because they feel the government is not taking them seriously. We have been making these demands for years.
We need more money for education, we need more teachers, we need better facilities,” said Chloe Grunenwald, vice president of the Federation of the General Association of Students (FAGE), the largest organisation of its kind in France, representing some 300,000 students. When interviewed by Al Jazeera, several students said they had joined recent protests in solidarity with those who first took to the streets. The broadening of the coalition is illustrated by the fact that both Grunenwald and Cohen-Morzadec represent university unions rallying in support of high school pupils.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
