Equality Without Differentiation: A Promise That Is Turning Against the Young

Student and school protests, like the social movements currently sweeping across France, reflect concerns that deserve to be taken seriously. Career prospects, teaching conditions, purchasing power and the deterioration of certain public services are all legitimate sources of concern.

Yet these protests also reveal a deeper contradiction: we have gradually built a society that rejects differentiation, challenges authority and struggles to accept the constraints necessary to fulfil its own promises. Young people are both the heirs to this society and its victims.

Our education system provides a particularly telling illustration. We set ourselves the goal of taking 80% of each age cohort to baccalauréat level. But too often, we lowered academic standards to meet this quantitative target. We then fostered the idea that any form of selection was illegitimate and that everyone could succeed in any academic track. By making university the main route forward, without selective entry, we effectively created a system in which selection takes place through failure. Among students who entered the first year of university in 2020 with a baccalauréat, 60% failed to obtain their bachelor’s degree. This proportion rises to 93.5% among those holding a vocational baccalauréat.

International comparisons are instructive. In Germany, Switzerland, Denmark and the Netherlands, vocational education and apprenticeships play a central role. They are recognised as fully-fledged pathways to qualifications and can also provide opportunities for further study. In France, we have too often devalued these educational tracks.

Thus, in the absence of adequate guidance and well-designed selection, we have created a system that can lead to failure, disappointment and a sense of downward social mobility. While students’ concerns are legitimate, they are also, in part, the product of this contradiction. Properly designed guidance and selection should help direct each individual towards a course suited to their abilities, ensure coherent educational pathways and recognise talent. They should also give everyone the opportunity to develop their potential to the fullest.

Equal opportunity therefore requires that we abandon neither high standards nor support. Yet we have too often confused benevolence with the removal of grades, reluctance to distinguish high achievers and a desire to spare students from confronting their difficulties. Not assessing, not differentiating, not setting ambitious goals: this is not protection. It is often a failure to help students make progress and, ultimately, a turning away from equal opportunity. True benevolence means supporting each individual so that they can achieve the very best of which they are capable, not lowering expectations so that no one is disappointed.

The same confusion affects our attitude towards authority. Any form of hierarchy is readily equated with domination. Some student protests have even challenged the very legitimacy of teachers, school leaders and institutions. Yet authority is not authoritarianism. When grounded in competence, responsibility, exemplary conduct and the rule of law, it is a condition of freedom and collective action. A democracy that no longer recognises any legitimate authority ultimately makes teaching, decision-making and even life in a shared society difficult, if not impossible.

By constantly confusing equality with egalitarianism, benevolence with the absence of high standards, and freedom with the absence of constraints, we risk depriving young people of the prospects to which they are legitimately entitled. We also risk making the economic and educational reforms necessary to reduce disappointment and frustration, and better prepare them for their professional future, impossible to implement. Nor can we continue to compromise the future of our younger generations by papering over our shortcomings through an ever-expanding spiral of public debt, which has already become unsustainable.

Professor of Economics, HEC Paris