Education: Ralbol!

Jammed into giant halls, 273,000 French teen-agers sweated through the notorious 13-to 18-hr. tortures of oral and written baccalauréat exams last week. They seemed docile enough. After all, their careers, future incomes and their very status in French society were at stake. But below the surface their mood was likely to be very different. In the past five months, tens of thousands of lycee (secondary school) students have rebelled at hundreds of the 2,258 state-run schools, occupying buildings, staging hunger strikes and fighting police.

Their rallying cry was Ralbol!—a contraction of the slang expression On en a ras le bol, meaning “We’re fed up to the gills.” Their complaint: a system that stuffs students into facilities that are often grimly overcrowded, and an outmoded curriculum that rates rote learning over lively thinking.

The lycée rebellions, though little noted in the world press, have been nearly as energetic as the university riots of 1968, in which students disrupted Paris and hastened De Gaulle’s exit from public life. One day in February, 15,000 Paris lycée students spontaneously took over the Latin Quarter’s Boulevard St. Michel and stayed put for seven hours in defiance of the Minister of the Interior, who had outlawed the demonstration. They dispersed only after a judge reversed a lower-court ruling and freed 19-year-old Gilles Guiot, who had been jailed on flimsy charges of striking a flic during an earlier demonstration.

Students who have not been at the barricades have stayed home, producing unprecedented absenteeism. President Georges Pompidou admitted last week that “things are not going well” in the lycees. “There is a deterioration in depth. The students are studying less and less, a kind of indifference has developed.”

Antiquated Labs. One problem is money: after years of pinching pennies, the government still spends only slightly more than $500 annually per student (v. $839 in the U.S.). The Left Bank lycéée of Buffon, built for 900 students in 1887, now has some 3,000. A lycée in Normandy was recently closed for a week while exterminators tried to root out a plague of lice. Laboratories often contain only meager quantities of the chemicals needed for experiments.

Even more intense is the students’ disgust with the lycée emphasis on rigid classical learning. Although gifted survivors of the grind emerge with sharply honed minds, today’s students are increasingly unable to see any connection between their mnemonic classes and the skills they will need as 20th century adults. Children from eleven to 15 are required to recite entire scenes from the plays of Corneille, Moliere and Racine, plus a spate of La Fontaine’s Fables. Even in top classes, pupils must memorize statistics on agricultural, industrial and energy production for long lists of tiny nations. Teachers are pleased to consider themselves “priests of the intellect,” as one put it; they are often so remote that they refuse to see students who want to discuss their work. Almost half of lycée entrants flunk out or are discouraged into dropping out before ever reaching the bac exams; one-third of those taking the tests last week are expected to fail.

School regulations can be as petty and confusing as the curriculum, a system that infuriates U.S. high school students as well. Many lycées compel students to line up in rows before marching to their seats. At a meeting in Angers, teen-agers applauded enthusiastically when a student recited a parody of lycée rules: “Article I: the teacher is always right. Article II: in the event that the teacher is wrong, Article I goes into effect.” On lycée walls, the most common graffito this spring has been On s’ennuie—”We’re bored.”

After his initial efforts to quell the lycée disorders with police action, Education Minister Oliver Guichard has tried to avoid confrontations and carry out mild reforms. For the first time since 1945, the national education budget this year exceeds that for national defense. A new curriculum is planned, with audiovisual aids and more contemporary subject matter. But the reforms will not take effect until 1973.

Tomorrow’s Authority. Despite the protests, TIME Correspondent Paul Ress reports: “No fundamental problems have been solved in France’s lycées. But the country’s lycéens have acquired a sense of solidarity that they never had before. There is every reason to expect a troubled year ahead.”

The fundamental problem is that neither Guichard—nor educators anywhere —can be sure how schools can compete for the respect of today’s restless youth. Guichard notes that “fifty years ago, four-fifths of teenagers’ knowledge was acquired from lycée teachers. Today, four-fifths of what they know comes from other sources—television, movies, newspapers, teen-age magazines.” Journalist-Historian Raymond Aron, who has followed the lycée rebels closely, puts it plainly: “Yesterday’s authority is gone, and tomorrow’s authority doesn’t exist yet.”