Two months in, the higher education strike in France has taken a turn for the revolutionary. The movement against the proposed reforms of the status of tutors at university, the training of schoolteachers and the rights of administrative staff to job security grows stronger by the day. The anger of tutors who would see their research work scrutinised with the risk of more teaching hours as punishment for ‘bad’ research under new reforms has been aligned with a wider fear for the future of the education.

In the same blanket of reforms, proposed last summer and due to be voted on next month, a major reform of the training of teachers in which paid professional experience would be replaced by another year of superfluous and costly study resulting in a two-tier qualification. The contracting of administrative staff is also a concern: in short, the future of the entire education system, and accordingly allusions are made to the difficulties of the young working (or why not unemployed?) mother who struggles to find a place for her child, pre-school having been privatised, increases in prescriptions for Ritalin, the widening disparity between good and bad schools; the social distress multiplies… As do the references to the UK and American systems of paid-for education, the high proportion of children on psychotropic drugs in the former and the near-impossibility of getting a university education in the latter.

The occupation of buildings has been a feature, across France and in Paris. The central campus of the Sorbonne in all its symbolism is now encircled by police, and university in France has effectively stopped. The domestic media are beginning to report on a problem that has finally amplified itself despite the lack of violent outbreaks often expected from student struggles, but the government remains characteristically autistic. This time, emanating from the sector of public service considered the most timid, not accepting the reforms is the very least demanded.

[dailymotion]http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8sel2_sorbonne-is-on-strike_news[/dailymotion]

French Universities have been on strike now for two months. Teachers have continued to teach final year students as well as participating in the movement and emotions are running high.