French Prove They Have Learned Some Lessons : Education: Student demonstrations in 1968 helped bring down the government. This time, officials are quick with promises.

Beginning with the famous 1968 student demonstrations in the Latin Quarter of Paris, education issues have been the sparks that ignited broader social movements and forced political changes in France.

Thus, French authorities have reacted nervously during the current movement by French high school students that erupted into violence Monday in the streets of Paris. Although the lycee movement is less than a month old, it has replaced the Persian Gulf crisis on the front pages of newspapers and dominates French political debate.

In response to student demands Monday, when more than 300,000 lyceens demonstrated in cities across France, Education Minister Lionel Jospin quickly announced an “emergency plan” allocating more resources to the overcrowded, understaffed secondary school system.

President Francois Mitterrand interrupted preparations for a 34-nation summit in Paris next week to meet with students at the Elysees Palace, carefully announcing that he agreed with nearly all of their proposals.

But the issues in play could hardly be more different than they were 22 years ago during the May demonstrations centered at the Sorbonne.

“Twenty years ago,” noted an editorialist for the newspaper Figaro, “we called for the end of authority, liberty for all and happiness until the sunrise of the future. Today, we demand order, security, modernization and outlets for work. It is practically the reverse.”

In 1968, students calling for more freedom and sweeping reforms in the university system enlisted factory workers and other supporters in a movement that eventually chased Charles de Gaulle from power. The demands in those days were for less rigidity and more openness in higher education, which at the time was reserved for only a small elite in French society.

The most celebrated slogan of the 1968 movement was “It is prohibited to prohibit.”

Many of the current leaders of the Socialist Party, including Prime Minister Michel Rocard and Defense Minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement, joined those students in the streets 22 years ago, calling for revolution and sharing ideals for the democratization of higher education.

When the Socialists came to power in 1981, education reforms were high on the agenda. However, they learned quickly what a volatile issue education can be in France.

Taking up the left’s cause against public aid to parochial schools--an issue that has alienated the Roman Catholic Church from the left since the French Revolution--the Socialist government under Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy was forced to resign in 1984 in the face of massive opposition. When the Socialists gave up the cause of strictly secular education the same year, historian Francois Furet declared that the French Revolution was finally over.

In 1985, then-Education Minister Chevenement announced an ambitious program to have 80% of all French high school students acquire a baccalaureat-- the secondary degree that grants its holders automatic admission into French universities. Traditionally, the majority of French students had been steered away from baccalaureat programs into technical and professional schools.

The revolutionary proposal placed enormous stress on the education system. Fifty years ago, fewer than 5% of French students qualified for the baccalaureat. In the words of Figaro columnist Georges Suffert: “At the beginning of the century, the ‘bac’ was a passport permitting entry into the bourgeois world.”

By the time Chevenement made his proposal in 1985, 40% of French students were in baccalaureat degree programs. This year the percentage jumped to 60%, and French lycees and universities found themselves increasingly crowded and understaffed.

Now, the students complain that while the government has opened the door to higher education for many more students, it has not provided the facilities and staff needed to provide that education.

At the beginning of the current school year, 1,278,700 French students were enrolled in baccalaureat programs at the senior high school level. The number of classes with more than 40 students has doubled since 1988, and students complain that school facilities are deteriorating and unsafe. The current protest movement was sparked by the rape of a 15-year-old girl in the lavatory of a lycee in suburban Paris.

Placards carried in the massive demonstration in Paris on Monday, which resulted in 83 arrests and more than 200 injuries, mainly to police officers, spoke of “worthless degrees,” “overcrowded campuses” and “unsafe lycees. “ Students chanted the name of Education Minister Jospin, asking him for “ sous (pennies) for the schools.”

According to Liberation editor Serge July, the students feel like “consumers confronted with false advertising.”

“The high school factory,” wrote July, a prominent leader in the 1968 student movement, “with its thousands of students and overcrowded, prefabricated classrooms, is like an antechamber to marginalization and unemployment.”

Mixed among the frustrated students in demonstrations Monday were hundreds of violent, mostly unemployed youths from the depressed working-class suburbs. These youths were blamed for the looting and violence that marred the massive march and disappointed the thousands of others who came to demonstrate for educational reform.

“My students were extremely disappointed and sad,” said Esther Jeffers, 36, an economics professor at Verlomme Lycee in Paris.

But despite the violence, which destroyed a commuter rail station, more than 100 private cars and hundreds of store windows, some French managed to see positive trends in the generally peaceful student movement.

“Is what happened in Paris on Monday imaginable in London or Bonn?” asked the leading newspaper Le Monde. “Would British or German lycee students ever have the idea to converge on their capital to expose their griefs and attract the attention of the highest authorities, asking them to pay attention to crumbling school walls, absent and incompetent professors, non-existent language labs, classes terribly overcrowded?”