Each generation differs from its predecessors, and parents have always worried about their progeny.

From my vantage point in Paris, I see that young Europeans are startlingly democratic. They’re egalitarian, and militant in their egalitarianism, skeptical of or hostile towards differences in station. They’re also more interested in forging horizontal bonds, connections among peers or cohorts, than in vertical or hierarchical relationships.

At the Lycée Jean Lurçat, a high school in Paris’s 13th arrondissement, students were unhappy with their English teacher, Claudine Lespagnol, age 58, with 8 years’ seniority at the school. The root of the problem seems to have been Ms. Lespagnol’s prohibition against using cell phones during class. (For clarity’s sake, the professorial objection was to cell phone use, not possession.) Students complained collectively to the principal and sought a change in teacher. Their request was denied.

Students then drafted and sent a group letter on behalf of the class. The letter read (my translation):

Re: Suggestions from the class

Madam,

Further to the collective letter of our grievances, we unfortunately were unable to get a favorable reply from the principal for a change of teacher. We want you to understand that, with your negative attitude towards the class, you’re wasting lots of time, making disrespectful remarks, trying desperately to have us listen to your class. It is true that many of us allow ourselves to be distracted in class by electronic accessories or our friends. But this kind of situation happens everywhere in everyday life. We think you take yourself too seriously when you yell at us when we are distracted; that causes a negative reaction among some of us. We therefore advise you to change your attitude, and to stop making remarks whenever one of us has a phone in his hands. It’s a waste of time. If you continue with the same attitude towards the class, the problem will go on and on, and each Monday you’ll suffer the consequences. We hope to spend an appropriate Monday with you after Autumn Break. If this is not the case, and if there’s no effort on your part to change, we’ll only have a few words to say: FUCK YOU.

Sincerely yours,

The Senior Class

The reaction? Nothing happened. A month went by, and teacher anger rose to a boiling point: the teachers walked out one Friday afternoon. Then the media took notice and publicized the affair. Only then did education officials take note. One came to the class to brand the letter “unacceptable” and “cowardly”, but also to say that “there’s no such thing as collective punishment”. The French education minister has announced an investigation to discover the author(s) of the letter.

I don’t want to read too much into a single incident, but three things strike me here:

  1. The students turn the tables on their teacher, using the kind of language that a teacher might use to correct a student. I see this less as impertinence than as egalitarianism.
  2. The teacher is supposed to compete (against cell phones and friends) for attention; a good teacher is one who can win students’ attention. I see this less as consumerism than as an acknowledgement of multitasking or a “noisy” world.
  3. Authority prefers not to know that any of this is going on. Its sympathies ultimately lie more with the students than with the teacher. By contrast, the media reaction seems to have been uniformly negative towards the students (although no one seems to have asked Claudine Lespagnol for her story).