Education Is a Right, Not a Privilege!
STATEMENT
European Left –European Left Youth Network (ELYN)
full support for the students in france !
The European Left Youth Network (ELYN) expresses its full solidarity with the high school students of France, who since the end of September have been leading a mobilization unprecedented in recent years. We salute the decisive role played in it by our organization, the Mouvement des Jeunes Communistes de France (MJCF).
What began in a handful of high schools has spread across the whole country. The national day of action on 29 September, which coincided with the public-sector mobilization, affected more than 400 schools. By 1 October, more than 900 actions had been reported, with every French department involved. For the first time, technical, vocational and agricultural high schools have joined en masse, a clear sign of how deep the discontent runs.
The causes are concrete: shortages of teachers and staff, overcrowded classes, absent teachers who are never replaced, and students going weeks or even months without a teacher in core subjects, putting their baccalauréat and their future at risk. This is no accident. It is the result of nearly a decade of austerity under Macron’s governments: cuts to public-sector jobs, a baccalauréat reform that individualizes students’ pathways and forces decisive choices ever earlier, a university admissions system, Parcoursup, that ranks and selects students while reproducing social inequalities, and the rise of private, fee-paying higher education. It is the same logic young people are suffering across Europe: treating education as a market rather than a right
ELYN firmly condemns the repression of the movement. Thousands of young people, many of them minors, have been arrested, and many students have been injured. We demand an end to the criminalization of student protest, respect for young people’s right to demonstrate, and that the investigations opened into police interventions be carried through to the end. We also reject the government’s narrative of the students’ supposed “instrumentalization”: denying their capacity to organize is a way of evading their demands.
The mobilization has already won its first victories. The government has been forced to withdraw its plan to introduce fees of €178 for BTS programmes and €270 for classes préparatoires, and has had to open talks with education organizations. These gains show that organized struggle delivers results, but they do not resolve the underlying causes.
ELYN therefore supports the national day of mobilization on 6 October and calls on all its member organizations to share this statement and express their solidarity with French youth. We stand for free, high-quality public education with the human and material resources it needs, free from social selection and accessible to every young person, whatever their background or wherever they live.
The youth of France are not alone. For the right to study and to choose our future!
European Left Youth Network (ELYN)