200 crumbling lycées: students flagged them, the state listed them, so who pays?

According to franceinfo, the Ministry of National Education (the French education ministry) has drawn up a list of 200 lycées (state secondary schools for pupils aged roughly 15 to 18) to be renovated as a priority. It is based on reports from students, one of whose demands is simply to be able to study in buildings that are in good condition. The outlet describes overheated classrooms and unusable toilets, and its headline speaks of ceilings collapsing and plasterboard falling down. At this stage, the report does not say what work will be carried out, with what budget, or on what timetable. We will not invent them.

What follows is our reading.

The list was put together by the students themselves. It took teenagers of fifteen to eighteen writing, photographing and demanding for the state to agree to look at its own ceiling. A public building should not need a student movement to be maintained, yet here we are. That the inventory runs through their reports says something about how this is managed: wait until the problem becomes visible, then draw up a "blacklist", the way one triages emergencies.

Schooling is a cog in what we call social reproduction: the work, paid or unpaid, that produces people rather than commodities. Teaching, feeding, caring, cleaning, minding. Capitalism depends on it and treats it as a burden. When budgets tighten, the work does not disappear; it moves. A room where you can barely breathe is a lesson that is harder to follow. Locked toilets mean a teenager holding it in all day. And in the evening, families make up the difference, when they can: homework help, time, sometimes the money for a private tutor. Mothers, statistically, often bear the brunt of this, but we have no figure for it here.

This is where class inequality reproduces itself, without fuss. A lycée falling to pieces is not a act of weather, it is a spending choice. Families with resources work around it: another school, private support, a study space at home. Everyone else absorbs the damage. The public school promises equality of opportunity; its material condition tells some pupils what others think their place is.

It would be wrong, though, to treat the state as a merely clumsy referee. Its budgets are trade-offs, made under the constraint of what is deemed tolerable for the public accounts. Two hundred priority lycées is a start. But a list is not a building site. The real question, the one the report leaves open, is money and timing: how much, by when, and who will check that the work actually gets done.

The students have done the job the institution should have done. The least we owe them is that the ceilings stay up.