Nothing revolutionary beyond they want teachers, they want toilets that work, they want smaller classes, and they want air conditioning. Read the excerpts below. There has been some violence.
It’s all here in Time Magazine.
The protests have been driven by anger over a variety of issues impacting French high schools.
Roughly 3,000 people have been arrested since the protests began nearly two weeks ago outside of Paris, with nearly 2,000 being detained on Thursday alone, the French interior ministry announced.
As demonstrations have at times escalated into violent clashes, 170 students and 65 school staff members have been injured, according to education minister Édouard Geffray. Nearly 400 police officers have also reportedly suffered injuries.
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A main complaint among demonstrators is the shortage of teachers and support staff in the country’s schools.
The education ministry found that during the 2024-2025 school year, nearly 10% of teaching hours went untaught in public secondary schools. About 7.5% of those lost hours were due to a failure to find substitutes.
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Complaints about insufficient resources and funding and poor infrastructure in schools have also been raised in the student protests.
“We are 35 per class, we don’t have enough chairs in classrooms,” a 15-year-old student told Reuters in the Paris suburb of Pantin as demonstrators clashed with police deploying tear gas in an effort to quell the protest.
“There are 35 of us per classroom. With 35 degrees Celsius [95 degrees Fahrenheit] in summer, it’s unbearable. There aren’t enough toilets, and there are water leaks in some rooms,” a 17-year-old said while speaking to AFP at a protest in Strasbourg in the northeast of France. “The building is falling apart, the cafeteria is too small. There’s zero budget, zero resources, not enough supervisors.”