How should we view young people? A commentary on the protests in France.
It was an event noticed around the world. The presidents of the United States and Russia spoke of apocalyptic events and of the decadence of Europe caused by an ever more multicultural European society. In Spain, people were certain that everything was the fault of Muslims and the parties of the left. In Germany, there was great concern about the never-ending wave of demonstrations and strikes in neighboring countries. In Italy and Belgium, young people felt called to also take to the streets. While in France, the prime minister spoke of a popular uprising deliberately agitated by the political opposition and announced that the police would be merciless at upcoming demonstrations. Curfews and bans on assembly were imposed.
The reason: the events of October 17, when 800,000—mostly young people—took to the streets. At first it was peaceful, with music and witty slogans. From early afternoon onward, however, street battles broke out in many cities; many young people and police officers were injured, town halls and other public buildings went up in flames, countless windows were smashed, shops looted, cars burned, and barricades erected. Beside a wrecked shop in Paris was written, “The lights are going out in the land of the Enlightenment” (Les lumières s’éteignent au pays des lumières).
Why did this happen? How could such hysteria arise?
Initially, it wasn’t about politics, migration, or religion; it was about education. About school schedules, frequent class cancellations, shortages of teachers, and dilapidated school buildings. And another important point for the students in the upper grades: they want to be able to choose freely where they study after their final exams, rather than having their university assigned to them by a software program. On September 16, students at a high school in a Paris suburb protested with these demands and blockaded their school building—with the approval of their teachers. Their action was immediately emulated at other high schools throughout the country.
Many students and teachers found the demands justified. Education researchers emphasized in articles for major daily newspapers that the young people were demanding what research has been showing for twenty years: high school schedules rarely align with the findings of chronobiology and educational science. Students are required to be present from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.; at the end of the day there are often classes that demand intense concentration, while during the day there are many hours without classes—long waiting periods that the young people cannot use creatively because of the poor infrastructure in the schools.
Certainly, these educational issues cannot be solved quickly in a country where schools are administered by centralized authority. But acknowledging that the questions are legitimate, holding a dialogue with student representatives, and organizing citizens’ forums involving teachers, students, and representatives of the school authorities would very likely have kept the protest within limits. It would then have been an opportunity for all involved to brainstorm—an opportunity to develop new ideas for improving high school education.
Instead, what the government offered was, above all, cynicism and violence. The students are like toothpaste, one politician remarked: once they’re squeezed out of the tube, it’s hard to get them back in. Strikes and school blockades were said to be merely expressions of laziness. Chinese students did well in the PISA study because they studied obediently in the classroom and didn’t go on strike all the time. The first peaceful demonstrations in September were attended almost exclusively by students, who were, however, provoked by an oversized police presence prepared to use violence.
The young people who had a hand torn off or lost an eye had not behaved violently. The left-liberal media and many voices from education and academia sided with the students and called on the government to enter into dialogue. This did not take place, and so the anger grew—not only among high school students, but also among university students and in large parts of society. A small number of citizens who revel in acts of violence were presumably electrified by this situation. This cocktail then exploded on October 17.
And yet, originally, a few students simply wanted to express that they want to learn and have better conditions for learning.
When we view our children and young people, can we somehow develop a prophetic type of gaze? A gaze that does not stop at present appearances, but instead feels and thinks ahead to the possibilities for development and learning in every child? A gaze that does not allow itself to be clouded by unpleasant behavior, but rather connects with the still-unconscious will to learn? A gaze that inwardly beholds the great potential of the emerging individuality?
When an educator comes with such a perspective, they support the young person’s will to learn far more strongly than any reward or punishment. If instead all that these young people receive from adults is the other kind of gaze which says, “You are lazy, stupid, and dangerous” and if creativity and spontaneity are gagged and paralyzed by the learning conditions at school, then violence may arise that will not be able to go unnoticed even by the most powerful of this world.
Ultimately, it is about a form of learning that makes a new kind of thinking possible: a thinking filled with heart, a thinking in the sign of Michael, as we might say with Rudolf Steiner. At the demonstration in Paris, a young woman carried a sign that read, “Against institutional violence—For emotional intelligence” (Contre les violences institutionnelles, pour l’intelligence émotionnelle).
Translation Joshua Kelberman
