Social anger: “It’s going to be hot to catch up”… High school students ready to return to class despite the blockades

Trash cans piled up hastily in front of establishment gates. A few cards scribbled with slogans and their demands. It has been more than a month since the high school protest movement, which has since spread into widespread social anger, has disrupted the school agenda.

“Seeing the roadblocks made us want to demonstrate and not work, especially since it's for a good cause,” says Anis, sitting for lunch on the stairs of a building porch a stone's throw from the filter blockage of his professional high school. But gradually the fear of missing the year begins to become pressing: “Before the holidays, there were two or three people in class, maximum. But this morning, there were already a few more of us, around ten,” observes his colleague Tom, both in the first year of a technical-commercial BTS at the Lycée du Rempart, in Marseille. A modest increase in class attendance that the young man also analyzes as weariness: “There are also some who are tired of staying at home and are starting to get bored. And if for us the exams are next year, the learning begins now.”

“We have crossed the red line”

A speech close to that of Raphaël, for his part in second general in this same high school which is experiencing a peaceful and intermittent blockage: “I'm starting to worry a little, really. There is a part of my brain that is starting to tell me: “it’s going to be hard” to catch up and the recovery is going to be even harder, all the assessments are going to fall on us,” confides the teenager who is getting ready to take his physics, chemistry and mathematics classes. “To be honest, I thought it was going to stop after the holidays. But if the State does nothing, the blockade will not stop, while we are just asking for mini-changes, to have fans for the summer, stools for everyone in physics and chemistry…”, he explains in this high school, far from being the worst off in the city. Same feeling for his comrade Alan who believes he never really returned from the summer holidays. “We've barely started the school year, so I feel like it's been three months since I last worked. It’s starting to be a lot,” he thinks.

Among the most militant high school students, the “return to class” option also becomes a hypothesis. “First, there is the fatigue of the blockages,” agrees Anne, who participated again this morning in a spontaneous demonstration of a good hundred high school students. In first grade, she wonders about the continuation of the movement: “We are thinking about other means, such as blocking only the days of demonstrations, for Thursday for example. I understand that we have to go back to class, even if compared to the extreme right and the repression, the anxiety of the baccalaureate is less.

“We can go back to class, but we still don’t have a philosophy teacher”

Also, high school students know that they can count on their teachers to be up to standard. “The teachers rather support the movement and reassure us by saying that the delay will be made up and that courses can be added,” say Inès, Linda and Sam, final year students at Montgrand high school, still in downtown Marseille. If they say they are “slightly worried” about the backlog accumulated in the programs, Linda is realistic: “Then we can catch up on what we want, return to class, but in my class, we still don’t have a philosophy teacher for seventeen concepts in the program.”

Sitting in the prefecture square waiting to know if there will be classes or not, three students express their fear of seeing “the gap with the high schools that remain open will widen after three weeks of skipped classes”. And for this, they assure that they work on their own at home, with the help of their teacher, before realizing: “We are worried, but if the government had listened, we would not be here.”