Plight of the Harmless

Over the gates of the huge (60,000 students) Sorbonne one morning last month, big yellow posters suddenly appeared for all Paris to see: CLOSED FOR LACK OF FUNDS. That same day, teachers and students went out on strike, milled about the streets, blocked traffic, demonstrated in front of the Bourse du Travail. The Sorbonne, however, was not demonstrating alone. Virtually every lycee (secondary school) and university in France had also closed down.

Though the strike lasted only one day, it was nonetheless disturbing. It was the third such walkout France had seen in four months, and it was obviously not to be the last. Last week the Federation d'Education Nationale, the French teachers' union, solemnly announced that there would soon be another--unless the government finally comes to grips with the nation's rapidly deteriorating education system.

Crude Cardboard. The French school crisis has been long in the making. Since the war, the average lycee class has grown from 30 pupils to 45 or 50. Over the next four years, the enrollment is likely to jump another 25%. Yet the government has not only failed to provide for this expansion; it has also failed to provide funds for repairs. The bombed-out municipal lycee in Brest, for instance, has never ' been rebuilt. The law faculty of the Sorbonne has had to expand into a building usually used for boxing bouts. Meanwhile, the Sorbonne's laboratories are hopelessly short of equipment: instead of the precise metal weights needed for experiments, students must make do with weights crudely fashioned out of cardboard.

In addition to the shortage of classrooms, there is a shortage of teachers, for few professions in France are so poorly paid. Average salaries run from $85 a month for primary schoolteachers to $300 for full-fledged university professors. As a result, says Deputy Charles Viatte, "each year practically all the professors who receive their agregation in physics immediately abandon the teaching profession. The agregation is the degree which normally should lead them to teach in lycees and universities, but industry offers them salaries which are three times higher than university pay." Added a spokesman for the teachers' federation: "Our teachers . . . make less money than a trained mechanic in a garage. Almost any butcher or grocer has a higher standard of living than our university professors."

Mere Pittance. The plight of the student is more alarming still. Since practically no shop or factory will employ them, only a handful of students can ever work their way through college. Of 150,000 university students in France, only 25,000 have government scholarships of about $28.50 a month. Since the average student's rent takes about $23, the scholarship leaves only a pittance for food, clothing and books. The fact is, says Etienne MacRay, secretary of the national student union, "unless a student has wealthy parents, he is forced to go hungry much of the time. This explains why, out of 1,000 students, only 32 are of working-class parents." Meanwhile, partly because of lack of funds, 6,600 out of 7,200 Sorbonne law students quit school last year, and because of lack of proper nourishment, the student TB rate (one out of 160) has become the highest in the nation.

Last week, in spite of the swelling chorus of protests, the government could still not see its way clear to acting on a 1951 recommendation that it appropriate 750 billion francs to pull the education system out of its present state. Would another strike really do any good? Said one philosophy professor sadly: "Too bad that we are not railroad men, electricians or postal employees. Our strike would hurt the politicians, and we would get quick results. But we are only harmless teachers and students, and our protests will have little effect."

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