Why are students in France protesting?

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High school students in France are fed up, and the country's student protests are widening. Around 250,000 people marched through the streets of various French cities yesterday, protesting what they say is a crumbling school system.

We want, uh, government to invest more in public schools because the schools are falling apart.

There can be leaks in the ceilings. The condition in which we, uh, work is, uh, very poor.

Um, we have buildings that are, like, the roof just fell on the, the, the students. Uh, a lot of floods in the buildings, a lot of rats.

This is the third week of student protests, and some of those protests have turned violent. Police have fired tear gas and water cannons at protesters. Demonstrators have set garbage cans on fire, destroyed bus shelters, and all of this is happening at a time when France faces a fiscal crisis and political instability. Sophie Pedder is the Paris Bureau Chief for The Economist. Sophie, hello.

Hi. Nice to join you.

Good to have you here. What's the mood like in Paris today?

[lip smacks] Well, it remains tense. I mean, yesterday was obviously a big day because it was a planned one-day demonstration, so you had, uh, a lot of people out on the streets joining those protests. Today, we're back to present to demonstrations outside particular schools, and some of those have spread to a number of universities as well. Um, but it's, it, there's a sort of tension in the air because I think that people are finding it difficult to see how this comes to an e- a satisfactory end, as you pointed out. Uh, budgets are squeezed. There isn't more money to sort of throw at the problem, and the, um, students aren't about to have their demands met in the short run. So it's a very, very difficult situation for the government to manage.

You've been speaking with some of the students taking part in the protests. What are they calling for from the government? What do they want?

Well, it was very interesting yesterday when I joined the protests on the streets in Paris because I felt that there were a really quite varied, uh, array of demands. I mean, one of them is, as your excerpts have just pointed out, some of them are to do with the buildings, disre- lack of repairs. Some of them to do with school timetables. There's been a reform of the school leaving exam, the baccalauréat, and that has, uh, made timetables more heavy. So these are very sort of specific school-related demands. But there are also people who want the government to fall. They are calling on Emmanuel Macron, the president,