„The lycéens’ demonstrations against the increase in the retirement age seemed to me something of a failure of the Cartesian critical spirit on which the French pride themselves. (Philosophy is still taught to French pupils, not English ones, who are probably by now unreachable and unteachable.) Whose labor, after all, do these lycéens imagine will pay for all of the unfunded pension obligations of the French state, as pensioners live longer and longer? Where do they imagine the money will come from?
Of course, it’s possible that they feel such solidarity with the elderly that they are eager to labor for their ease and comfort, youth being supposedly the idealistic period of life. But somehow I doubt that such idealism is the explanation. What probably accounts for the strikes is a mixture of combativeness—the prejudice that being against something is inherently superior, morally speaking, to being for it—and a desire for a day off from school.”