Head teachers caught in a vice: state schools hang on by their fingertips

According to franceinfo, some thirty Paris proviseurs (heads of lycées, the French secondary schools for pupils aged 15 to 18) met on Thursday in front of the Sorbonne, speaking on behalf of the entire profession, as the lycée pupils' protest movement carries on. They describe a context that is "wearing on a daily basis", say they are "exposed to violence of unprecedented severity", and warn that the situation "could blow up on a daily basis". One of them sums it up: "Whatever we do, we are caught in a vice." The details of the violent incidents mentioned, their number and the pupils' specific demands do not appear in the summary available to us: we will not invent them.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

A vice needs two jaws. On one side, pupils who are mobilising, which is not illegitimate in itself: you do not learn to be a citizen by staying silent. On the other, an institution asked to keep order, to welcome, protect and educate, with the resources we all know about. In between, someone has to absorb the shock. Here, it is the head teachers and, behind them, the supervisors, teachers, staff and conseillers d'éducation (pastoral and discipline advisers), all those whose work cannot be measured in dashboards.

This is the angle that gets forgotten: the school is one link in what Marxist feminists call social reproduction, the labour that produces people rather than commodities. Minding, feeding, teaching, soothing. Capitalism depends on it entirely and treats it as an expense. When you cut back on this sector, the work does not disappear: it shifts. It falls on the staff, who do ever more, and on families, who make up the difference in the evenings, at home, when they can. And it is still very often mothers who make the connection.

Alexandra Kollontai noted long ago, in Communism and the Family, that the care of children passes gradually from the family to the collective, including through the public school. But the collective has to give itself the means to do so. When it does not, responsibility quietly returns to the same shoulders.

Thirty head teachers taking to the streets is not trivial: this profession is normally bound by the duty of reserve, and nobody marches for fun. The signal matters, whatever one thinks of the blockades. It says that a public service can crack from the top as well as the bottom, and that this is not solved by orders to "hold on".

The real question, then, is not whether the pupils or the head teachers are right. It is why the only answer to a school under strain seems to be asking those who work there to absorb even more. A vice does not loosen by asking the things caught in it to make themselves smaller: you have to turn the screw, that is, the posts, the resources and the respect.