Opinion: A classroom is not a battlefield

A fifteen-year-old went to a demonstration about his school and came home without a hand. That sentence should end the argument about whether France’s response to its student protests was proportionate. It will not, because governments that arm police against children always find a second argument: order, damage, the violence of the other side. But the order of events matters. The grenade was suspended after the injury, not before it. The state needed a maimed child to discover what teachers, unions and the students themselves had been saying for three weeks.

The demands were not exotic. More teachers. Buildings that do not crumble. An admissions system that does not quietly sort children by postcode and parental income. In the Dravidian tradition this paper inherits, Periyar treated education as the first instrument of self-respect, Anna carried it into public policy, and Kalaignar built institutions on the premise that a classroom is where a society repays its debt to the future. France’s lycéens were asking, in their own idiom, for the same settlement: that the republic’s promise be funded, not merely recited.

What they received first was a lesson in the other curriculum. Six and a half thousand arrests, most of them minors. More than two hundred teenagers injured. A prime ministerial shrug dressed up as candour, accidents happen. Accidents do not throw themselves. Somebody procured the grenades, somebody authorised their use against crowds that included schoolchildren, and somebody calculated that the politics of looking firm outweighed the risk that has now been realised in a hospital ward in Lens.

Suspension is therefore the minimum, not the resolution. Paris should publish the full injury and arrest figures, school by school and town by town; ban stun grenades against assemblies outright rather than pausing them for a news cycle; and put the education budget, staffing and repairs in front of the same cameras that carried the prime minister’s address. A republic confident in its classrooms does not fear its pupils.

There is a wider warning here, and it travels well beyond France. Every state, including our own, is tempted to answer the young with procedure and force, and to call the answer governance. The test of a government is simpler: when children say the school is failing, does it reach first for the budget book or for the baton? This month, France reached for the baton. The hand that was lost will not grow back when the funding finally arrives.