What American Schools Should Learn From France’s Protests

It's been nearly a month since riots that began outside high schools in France have exploded into widespread chaos and violence throughout Europe. There are undoubtedly plenty of discussions to be had about the role of radical Islamists and left-wing extremist groups in organizing the unrest and fanning the flames into a continent-wide disaster. But what shouldn't get lost in the discussion is what some of the students were protesting over in the first place – and what the American education system can learn from their frustration.

The wave of unrest now sweeping Europe began at the Saint-Exupéry high school in Créteil, outside Paris. Students blocked the entrances in support of striking teachers, and as the protests spread, students called for more teachers, repairs to school buildings, and an end to “Parcoursup,” the website they use to apply to college. For students waiting to hear where they might study the following year, the process often feels like a decision about their future was being made seemingly at random behind a screen.

On Parcoursup, students can apply to several programs through a single application. Each program ranks its applicants, and the site tells students whether they’ve been offered a spot or put on a waiting list. Students can spend weeks watching their position on a waiting list change, unsure whether they’ll get into a program. It can also be hard to tell why one program ranked them higher than another, or what they could have done differently.

It is one thing to know that colleges have to rank their applicants. It is another to spend weeks watching a number on a screen and wondering what it means for the rest of your life. And the uncertainty extends well beyond the admissions decision. In a sluggish economy, with AI changing the kinds of work young people can expect to find, even students who get into the program they want can wonder what it will lead to.

Bishop Matthieu Rougé of Nanterre, president of the Council for Catholic Education of the French Bishops’ Conference, heard a deeper frustration in the protests. In an essay originally published in French in La Croix, he asked what lay behind demands about schedules, equipment, and replacing absent teachers. His answer, in translation: “The need for young people to be valued, to be loved, to truly be awakened to the best in themselves.”

Rougé acknowledges that Parcoursup is useful. His concern is what happens when applying to college becomes the work of senior year. He argues that students who once devoted that year to preparing for the baccalaureate, France’s school-leaving exam, now pour much of their energy into their online applications.

Once those are in, he writes, students “await the baccalaureate exam as a mere formality.” He singles out philosophy as a subject that loses class time. Just when students are being asked to make consequential choices about their lives, there is less time in school to think about what they want from those lives.

“No education is complete if it does not address the question of meaning,” Pope Leo XIV recently told UNESCO, as Rougé recalls. That is what the Catholic tradition means by the formation of the soul. Education should help young people judge what is worth pursuing, understand what they owe to others, and see their own lives in the history of the communities they inherit.

Learning how to earn a living is part of that work. So is learning how to live with other people and take responsibility for a country you will have a hand in governing.

The students in Créteil could name what they were missing – teachers, decent classrooms, and a way to apply to college that made sense to them. Rougé’s argument is that those demands point to a deeper failure. A school can ask teenagers to make one consequential choice after another about their futures while giving them less and less time to think about what those futures are for. You can feel that failure long before you have the words for it.

In America, we tend to talk about that frustration in dollars. How much will a degree cost? What will it earn? Those are urgent questions for students taking on debt for degrees they worry won’t pay off.

Our schools also owe them an education in the country they live in. A student should graduate with the basic knowledge of how to engage in civic life in an informed and productive way. They should know history that gives context for what it means to be an American. They should understand the cultural traditions that make this country special.

We ask young Americans to make expensive decisions about the rest of their lives while giving too many of them too little sense of where they stand or what they can do together. If they leave school with a plan for getting a job and little idea of how to take part in the life of their country, we have failed to educate them as citizens.

What started in France and has now spread to the rest of Europe should be a warning to America in multiple ways. One of those is a lesson about the importance of an education system that imparts meaning, not just knowledge, to students.