France’s youth-led education crisis: systemic neglect, precarity, and the global revolt against neoliberal schooling
Original framing: “‘We just want to be listened to’: student protests shut schools across France” — The Guardian - World
Indigenous education systems, such as those of the Māori in Aotearoa/New Zealand or the Navajo Nation in the U.S., treat learning as a communal and land-based practice, not a commodified service. These models emphasize oral traditions, intergenerational knowledge, and reciprocal relationships with the environment—principles that directly contradict France’s industrialized, exam-driven system. The protests could draw from these frameworks to demand education that centers ecological and cultural sovereignty, but such perspectives are entirely absent from mainstream discourse.
The French student protests are not an isolated outburst but the latest chapter in a global revolt against neoliberal education—a system designed to reproduce inequality under the guise of ‘meritocracy.
’ The mainstream media’s focus on ‘disruption’ obscures the structural causes: decades of austerity, racialized underfunding, and the deliberate hollowing out of public institutions by policymakers who treat education as a market rather than a right. Historical parallels, from 1968 to Chile’s *Pingüinos*, show that such movements can force systemic change—but only when they reject incremental reforms and demand radical restructuring, such as democratic governance, debt cancellation, and decolonial curricula. The trickster element here is the media’s refusal to see the protests as anything but ‘chaos,’ when in fact they are a disciplined disruption exposing the absurdity of a system that claims to educate while failing its most vulnerable. The path forward lies in treating education as a public good, not a commodity—and the students’ defiance is the first step in reclaiming it.