Author: Eduardo Chávez Molina
This essay examines the student protests in France and the deep fracture within the nation’s social and educational compact, drawing on the analytical framework of sociologist François Dubet. The current crisis is not merely budgetary; rather, it represents the collapse of the state’s symbolic promise. Public education—once guaranteed as a reliable engine for social mobility and equality—now delivers underfunded institutions, deteriorating facilities, and degrees that hold diminishing value in the labor market.
Against this backdrop of escalating educational, territorial, and judicial inequalities, high school students have organized through radically decentralized movements. The article details how the state responds with criminalization and repression—shifting the financial consequences of its own infrastructural neglect onto working-class families—thereby intensifying social discontent and institutional disillusionment while leaving room for collective resilience and hope.
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