Blocked high schools: the minister wants pupils back in class, they want to be heard

According to Le Monde, the minister of national education, Edouard Geffray, declared that "the absolute priority is that pupils can get back to lessons". The paper notes that, despite the concessions announced by the government in the week of 26 October, several student and pupil organisations have called for the mobilisation to continue when term resumes on Monday 2 November.

Those are the facts the dispatch gives us, and they are thin. We do not know here what the concessions actually are, which high schools are blockaded, or how many young people are involved. We will not invent them. What remains is a question of structure, which the minister's sentence poses better than he does.

What we are reading is a classic scene. Pupils mobilise, walk out of classrooms, block the doors. Power answers with a word of common sense: back to class. Who could be against school? But the formula shifts the debate. It turns a demand into a problem of order, and organisations into troublemakers. The blockade is no longer a message, it is a nuisance. We stop discussing what is being asked and start discussing the timetable.

Yet a movement that organises from below learns as it goes. Rosa Luxemburg saw in the mass strike a "natural, impulsive" form of great struggles, in which people atomised by daily life gather and discover a strength (our paraphrase of The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions). This is not about comparing a school in 2026 to Russia in 1905, which would be absurd. It is about holding on to this idea: the general assemblies, the show-of-hands votes, the blockade committees are a school, and perhaps the most instructive one of the year.

The concessions announced call for the same caution. A reform wrested from the street counts, and nobody should spurn it. But it is only worth something if it strengthens the confidence and power of those who won it, rather than sending them home. A clever government gives ground precisely to put out the fire, then takes back what it gave once the budget calendar suits it. That organisations refuse to stop at the first gesture may be lucidity rather than obstinacy. It is for them to say, and for us to report, exactly what they are asking for.

Let us be plain: these are not abstractions, they are teenagers and young adults taking the risk of absence, of sanction, of exhaustion. Treating them as unruly pupils to be lined up again is to miss what is at stake. The minister is right on one point: school is precious. But those who walk through its doors must still feel they are being listened to. A door shut by the ministry rarely reopens at the sound of an instruction; it opens when people stop ringing the bell to drown out the voices.