‘Not a problem of short-term solutions’: French students demand structural change, better conditions

Home France To display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement. One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading. To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site. Cover image: © France 24 06:14 Issued on: 19/10/2026 - 07:19 Delano D'Souza is pleased to welcome Gökçe Tuncel, Sociologist and post-doctoral researcher associated with the Université Paris-Est Créteil (UPEC) and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. What began as a protest over missing teachers and inadequate resources at a high school in Créteil has rapidly evolved into a wider mobilization challenging structural inequalities within France’s public education system. “This is not a problem of short-term solutions. This is a structural problem that they are denouncing, and their demands are structural changes,” explains Tuncel. The movement's rapid expansion reflects more than the organizational power of social media. It reveals a growing political consciousness among young people confronting deteriorating educational infrastructure, unequal access to resources, and an increasingly uncertai...