We Don’t Care About Our Education

A movement that began in classrooms now burns through Europe as hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets. World leaders and extremists have seized the narrative to push their own agendas; the demonstrations themselves have broadened to wider cost-of-living issues. They began, however, with a simple demand: a better education system. 

Lycée students, too young to vote in past elections, rallied so their government would listen. They spoke out about teacher shortages, classrooms in disrepair, long school days, and an increasingly stressful university admissions system. All of these ordeals heavily afflicted the non-affluent. 

Our education system suffers from similar issues. A fifth of UK secondary schools are at or over capacity. At the same time, there are not enough teachers. Many schools are reducing timetables and cutting entire subjects from the curriculum to compensate. This deprives students of learning opportunities and narrows their options for further study. 

These crises were completely avoidable. Children enter secondary school around age eleven. That’s eleven years to prepare for incoming cohorts. Failure to do so screams that the system is broken. 

You may read my tirade and think, ‘If this country has so many problems with education, why aren’t people protesting here too?’ 

That’s precisely my point. Reading stories of idealistic children facing down armed riot officers outside their crumbling schools, I am awed by the courage of the students protesting, yet I’ve never tried to follow their example. It’s tempting to explain this away as a mere cultural difference. The French have a reputation and history of protest, from the Revolution to May 68, but that rationale quickly falls apart. Britain is no stranger to public dissent. Just six years ago, around half a million people marched for a second EU referendum. Wars and immigration policy repeatedly incite rallies also. Educational decline, however, consistently fails to provoke sustained public outrage. 

We cannot claim ignorance; knowledge of the deteriorating education system is widespread. The strike actions of teachers and lecturers in recent years over pay issues and heavy workloads have been reported comprehensively. These factors are inextricably linked to education quality — insufficient pay discourages people from pursuing teaching, and overworked staff have less attention for their students. Yet, strike campaigns usually aren’t actively aided by students. We don’t join our educators on picket lines or create petitions to support their cause.

Some will argue that students are simply too busy or too financially unstable to organise demonstrations. There is truth in this. Yet, French students face many of the same constraints. The question is not why every individual fails to become an activist, but why educational decline hasn’t generated the same sense of collective urgency in the UK as it has elsewhere.

Perhaps the uncomfortable truth is that we don’t care enough. 

We care enough to complain, to blame ministers, and to shake our heads at the latest statistics. But not enough to organise and boycott a broken system and demand that things change. The students protesting in France may not find solutions to all of their problems, but they’ve done something we have not: forced education onto the national agenda because they refuse to accept decline as inevitable. We, by contrast, have largely learned to live with it. 

Every year when reports emerge on the pressures afflicting schools, we ruefully acknowledge the problem and move on. If education is as important as society claims, then our silence is difficult to explain. If we are unwilling to fight for it, perhaps we value it less than we’d like to believe.

Illustration from Wikimedia Commons