France Detains Nearly 7,000 During School Protests, 24 Schools Are Burned or Ransacked, and Socialist Economists Discover the Benefits of Teaching Children Behind Bars
PARIS, FRANCE - French education officials have settled on a fix for the national school funding crisis: stop educating students and start detaining them. Nearly 7,000 people were taken into custody during the nationwide student protests, and the education ministry says 24 schools have been burned or ransacked. A country that cannot find enough teachers has, it turns out, no trouble finding riot police.
For decades, French socialist politicians have struggled to square their promise of free public education with their ability to pay for it. This week an unlikely partnership of angry students, government accountants and the national police produced a new educational institution: the prison.
The facilities are already in place. The classrooms are called cells. Meals are provided, though nobody compliments the chef. Attendance is compulsory, the doors lock automatically, and a student who refuses to participate cannot simply walk home. There are no teacher shortages, because there are no teachers.
French socialism has finally achieved the impossible: a public education system without education.
French School Protests: The New National Curriculum Is Reading, Writing and Resisting Arrest
Students began the protests over overcrowded classrooms, crumbling buildings, missing teachers and falling standards. According to Anadolu reporting carried by Bernama, Education Minister Edouard Geffray told BFMTV that 1,207 high schools had been disrupted or blocked at some point. The government answered with what may be the most ambitious extracurricular policing programme in European history.
In the traditional French system, a pupil who misbehaves gets detention after school. Under the new arrangement, school has been cancelled and detention is the whole experience.
There are obvious advantages. One teacher supervising 35 students can struggle to keep order. One guard supervising 35 inmates has considerably more authority, especially when the room comes with steel doors and surveillance cameras. Nobody has to raise a hand to ask permission to leave any more. They request parole. The ministry can finally promise 100% attendance, an achievement once thought impossible without amending the constitution.
One Parisian mother said her son's school had stopped teaching mathematics. Education officials reassured her that the boy was continuing his numerical development through police identification numbers, arrest statistics and the calculation of possible sentences.
History gets renewed emphasis. Pupils will study the storming of the Bastille, though officials have advised against attempting the practical exam. The annual school trip becomes a coach ride to a correctional facility, and parents must sign a permission slip, unless the police have already signed it for them.
France Student Protests Show That Burning Down a School Cuts Its Maintenance Costs
One of the stranger developments is the destruction of school buildings during demonstrations demanding better school buildings. A school with leaking pipes, broken windows and no heating is a real burden on the taxpayer. A school reduced to smoking rubble has no leaking pipes, no windows and no complaints about the heating.
Pupils used to grumble that their classrooms were too hot in summer. After the fires, several of them were hotter still, though only briefly.
The economic principle is easy enough to follow: when the government cannot maintain public property, destroy the property and ask the government to build it again. It is socialism with a demolition clause.
The sums are less kind. If a school needs €2 million in repairs and protesters cause €5 million in damage, the bill does not come to negative €3 million. It comes to €7 million, plus the laboratory equipment, the computers and whatever was left of the headmaster's blood pressure medication. French socialist theorists have responded by proposing to remove mathematics from the curriculum until its findings become politically convenient.
Police Officers Are Easier to Find Than Physics Teachers in France
The shortage of teachers sits at the centre of the students' grievances. Yet the state can put police officers on any street where students gather in numbers. The prime minister's office put the number of police officers injured at 715. Nobody can say how many physics teachers the country has lost, because nobody has been counting.
Where, then, are all these officers when a school needs somebody to explain algebra? The new educational philosophy has an answer: algebra is an outdated bourgeois obsession with accuracy, and riot control makes a more practical syllabus. Physics can be taught through the trajectory of tear-gas canisters. Chemistry comes with smoke and combustion. Geography begins the moment police chase protesters through an unfamiliar neighbourhood.
Physical education needs no extra funding. Students run. The government could close the whole sports budget by announcing that a line of riot police is approaching from the other end of the road.
Citizenship lessons get simpler too. Pupils learn that France guarantees freedom of expression, assembly and association, subject to a practical exam administered by the Interior Ministry. Meanwhile the government has promised thousands of substitute teachers. The gap between promising teachers and finding them remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of French administration. The same state that can deploy hundreds of officers before lunch needs a parliamentary committee, three consultations and a national dialogue to locate someone qualified to teach French literature.
French Education Funding Crisis: Prisons Are Cheaper, Provided Nobody Reads the Accounts
The case for swapping schools for prisons has won particular enthusiasm among France's revolutionary accounting community. A prison already has a library, a canteen, recreation space, accommodation, security and a disciplinary structure. Three meals a day end the argument over school lunches. Homework is unnecessary because nobody takes it home. School buses become police vans, which cuts down on pupils missing the morning journey. Parents who complain about teenagers on their phones will find the policy extremely effective.
There is one small problem. Prisons are not cheaper than schools. Incarceration means expensive staff, buildings, healthcare, security and legal procedure. French bureaucracy has an elegant way round it: book the cost to the justice ministry instead of the education ministry. The education budget improves at once. The justice budget gets worse, but that is another minister's problem.
This is the genius of departmental accounting. Move an expense from one ministry to another and the government announces a saving without anybody saving a penny. A family trying the same trick would call itself rich because the mortgage was on a different credit card. France has turned the practice into a philosophy of government.
Release on Parole: France's Proposed School Graduation Ceremony
Under the proposed reforms, successful students receive a certificate of rehabilitation instead of a diploma. Pupils of exceptional promise may graduate early for good behaviour. The school report becomes a probation assessment, and teachers grade a student's cooperation with custodial authorities rather than their chemistry.
Parents' evenings get more interesting. A mother who complained that her daughter wasn't getting enough individual attention may find the school has assigned a dedicated case officer. The girl will receive an individual development plan, compulsory counselling and a timetable that no sick teacher can interrupt.
Vocational options are said to be excellent. Would-be engineers can repair prison furniture. Future chefs can help in the kitchen. Aspiring politicians can start their careers with a thorough grounding in institutional confinement. Those with a head for finance go straight to the Ministry of Economy and Finance, where an inability to balance a budget counts as a professional qualification. Students who want to be socialist activists will receive specialist instruction in demanding government funds to rebuild buildings their comrades helped to burn.
Why Rebuilding Burned French Schools Takes Capitalism, Not Slogans
The most interesting economic lesson concerns public services and private production. A destroyed school cannot be rebuilt with slogans, marches or a unanimous vote at a revolutionary committee. Someone has to make the bricks. Someone has to haul the cement. Someone has to produce the windows, the wiring, the heating plant and the desks, and those people generally expect to be paid.
The builders will want wages, the contractors will want contracts, and the suppliers will want the thing French revolutionaries have long regarded with suspicion: profit. Getting rid of private economic activity makes it surprisingly hard to rebuild public infrastructure. Nobody has ever assembled a chemistry laboratory out of outrage. A government can redistribute wealth. It cannot redistribute a building that has already burned to the ground.
Even so, activists have demanded that the wealthy pay for reconstruction. Taxpayers paid for the original school, will pay for it again after it burns, and will then pay for the police response to the demonstration demanding a third school. The system is extremely good at producing public spending. It is less good at producing educated children.
The Serious Part: French Students Have Legitimate Demands
Underneath the jokes, many of the students are making reasonable requests. They want working classrooms, teachers who turn up, decent facilities and an education that prepares them for adult life. Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu has acknowledged those demands as legitimate while calling the unrest the most violent student demonstrations in decades. Reuters reported that France paused the use of stun grenades after a 15-year-old lost his hand in a clash with riot police in Lens. Euronews counted more than 6,500 arrests, most of them minors.
A government should not have to pick between tolerating arson and treating every angry teenager as a criminal. The trouble is that political movements find it easier to organise a march than to fix a toilet, hire a teacher or balance a budget. Students complain, ministers promise reform, protesters demand results by Friday, a minority burn something, and the taxpayer receives another invoice. Every crisis creates a committee, every committee creates a budget, every budget creates a dispute, and every dispute creates another crisis. Education policy has become a perpetual motion machine driven by public dissatisfaction, and perpetual motion machines do not work. Neither do schools without teachers, or classrooms that have burned down.
Final Exam: If France Cannot Afford Schools, Who Will Pay for the Prisons?
The great French education experiment may end with one exam question. A country has nearly 7,000 people detained over protests about school funding, 24 school buildings burned or ransacked, thousands of pupils missing lessons and a government promising money it is struggling to find. How much has the country saved?
The answer is nothing, and the exercise has probably made the underlying problem worse. French political culture can still treat an expensive failure as proof that too little was spent on the last expensive failure. Sooner or later someone will propose higher taxes, a larger bureaucracy and a new commission to find out why the old commissions failed to improve education. The commission will deliver a 600-page report recommending another commission.
By then the prisons may be full, and French socialists will ask for money to build new ones for students who were protesting the government's inability to pay for schools. That completes the circle.
The country that could not afford to educate its children will discover it cannot afford to imprison them either.
The Ministry of Education will then announce the one cost-saving measure left. Release the students. Reopen the schools. And, if absolutely necessary, try teaching them something.
Five Humorous Observations About France's Schools-to-Prison Plan
- The French government can't find one physics teacher, but by Tuesday it had enough riot police to cover the whole country. That's not a funding problem. That's a recruiting problem. Somebody over there is great at hiring for the wrong job.
- They burned down 24 schools to demand better schools. That's like torching your landlord's building to complain about the heating. Technically, the heating issue is resolved.
- Nearly 7,000 people detained, and the plan is a commission. Nobody in history has been calmed down by a commission. A commission is just a meeting that's afraid to leave the room.
- Moving the prison bill over to the justice ministry's budget is paying off one credit card with another and telling your wife you got a raise.
- The report card turns into a probation assessment. My house wouldn't have noticed. "Needs to apply himself" and "violated the terms of release" were basically the same sentence at my dinner table.
Disclaimer
This article is satirical commentary based on reported French student demonstrations, mass detentions, damaged schools and public education funding disputes. The proposed replacement of schools with prisons, related policy statements and comic characters are satirical devices, not actual French government announcements. The reported number of detentions does not mean that all those detained were jailed or convicted. This story is entirely a human collaboration between two sentient beings: the world's oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer. Both were educated in buildings with roofs, and recommend it. More news satire sites and funny news stories are available, with no parole conditions attached.
SOURCE: Financial Times https://prat.uk/?p=51982
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