Gardens of adulthood

Videos of the high school rebellion in France were nothing short of infuriating. Yet I find myself trying to refrain from generational Manichaeism. Claiming that this generation is evil is both uninteresting and useless: it leaves us with little to do beyond repression. A more interesting approach is to understand where our current education system fails, and how we might design better incentives.

Protest as a substitute for power

To protest is to beg for power. Unfortunately, we French have a culture of protests. Our founding myth was the start of a (highly romanticized) revolution. Our institutions are still largely the same as those designed under the first Empire. So when we have an issue, we go to the streets. And every protest is always directly pointed at the person in the hot seat. In no other country that I know are protests either as frequent and personally pointed at the head of government.

This awaiting for the clemency of our “providential man” creates passivity and anger. The French feel betrayed by their paternal figure whenever something goes wrong. I love this country, and I am also tired of watching it wait for a father to fix what citizens could fix themselves. We are incompetent when it comes to governance, and the high school riots are a prime example of the problem. School is also precisely where the change should happen.

Schools should cultivate adults

One idea I keep coming back to is making every school a student- and parent-owned cooperative. Parents could buy a share in the school when their child enrols, then sell it when the child graduates, recovering some or all of their initial investment. This could also serve as a useful seed account for the child. One could argue that this is already the case with the public school system, since the state represents everyone. I don’t think that is true. The state is a country-wide, shared loss-making bank account that never pays dividends and keeps calling for more capital. Its sheer size makes meaningful accountability almost impossible.

I’m convinced that more people should experience ownership. It teaches responsibility, compromise and long-term thinking: all things children are absolutely capable of learning given the right incentives. I find it hard to imagine students letting their peers burn down a high school they actually co-owned. And if students weren’t enough to tame the rebellion, parents would have rushed to get their kid home and save the school.

Cooperative schools would also free schools from rigid curricula. Student-run businesses could reinvest profits in the school’s infrastructure, allowing the value of the school to compound over generations. It would also teach governance and compromise: two skills French graduates are woefully short of, and that are essential to a well-functioning democracy.

Most importantly, it would teach the benefits of democracy from a young age. Populism is a direct consequence of our failure in this domain, because the costs of democracy are obvious but its benefits are easily forgotten.

France may make this particularly obvious, but the principle applies much more broadly. We should see cooperative schools as evolutionary organizations, owned collectively by successive generations of families.

Let’s cultivate gardens of adulthood.

Vic