Look, we gotta keep it 100: it is straight up boiling out here in France right now, and the school system is in absolute shambles. We are talking about classroom temperatures hitting a crazy 40C, and the teaching unions are finally saying "enough is enough." They’re calling for strikes, telling the government that this "blatant lack of preparation" is putting everybody’s health on the line. They basically told teachers to walk out whenever they feel the heat is too much, and honestly, can you even blame them? Nobody trying to work in a literal oven.

The government is out here trying to act like they got everything under control by shutting down 3,500 schools and cutting hours at another 10,000. But let’s be real—that’s just damage control because they messed up in the first place. These school buildings are built like total heat traps. They got no A/C, no insulation, and giant glass windows with zero shutters to block the sun. It’s like the people who built them forgot that summer comes every single year.

Because the state failed to do its job, the teachers in primary and nursery schools are forced to do the absolute most just to keep the kids safe. We are talking about educators keeping the curtains closed all day and literally spraying little kids with water bottles just to keep them from overheating. That’s not teaching, that’s straight-up survival mode. It’s wild that in a rich country like France, teachers have to act like they’re in the middle of a desert survival movie just to get through a school day.

But the real disrespect is coming from the top. Education Minister Édouard Geffray decided to play tough and insisted that the "brevet" exams for over 850,000 fifteen-year-old kids are still going down on Friday, no matter what. His big-brain solution? Shifting the exams to the morning, spacing out the desks, handing out some water, and letting the kids take pauses to cool off. He’s basically telling these kids to suck it up and sweat it out now because postponing the exams to September would be too much of a hassle for his department. Easy for him to say when he’s probably sitting in a nice, cool office with the A/C blasting.

Meanwhile, the older teens taking their oral baccalaureate exams are already out here fighting for their lives. Both the students and the examiners are straight-up fainting in the middle of tests, having to get treated by school nurses because the rooms are too hot to breathe. Imagine trying to pass a life-defining exam when you’re literally about to pass out from heat exhaustion. The system is setting these kids up to fail, no cap.