French kids in online gaming are also extremely disproportionately rude and toxic in my experience. Every time I see a French team or player in Rocket League they are almost always toxic against a) their own team mate(s), or b) the opposing team, or c) both.
Me and my buddies have discussed at length how it just seems like they’re unhappy in general. Must be tough. Hard to feel empathy when they’re so toxic though…
No explanation as to why.
The rise after 2020 could have been a by-product of the pandemic, but the later rise in 2024 is not explained in the article.
Any French who could shed some light?
I live in France. One thing that comes to mind is hesitancy to report it due to parents not taking their children to hospital.
The other thing is that there is a lot of pressure put on children starting in middle school.
I teach at a business school and the students tell it like this:
- growing up their parents sign them up for extra curriculars, usually 2 days a week;
- starting middle school, they must cope with the joys of adolescence on top of extracurriculars and teachers telling them that the brevet is the most important thing ever;
- the brevet is a test that helps determine their parcours, or education path;
- getting into a good high school is very important for some students;
- once arriving in high school they begin to prep for the final exams, the baccalauréat (the Bac);
- there is a very poorly designed thing called Parcoursup that determines post-secondary education choices…
Basically, students are told again and again that everything they do is the most important thing.
Some of my students are still so traumatized that they cry if they get below 75% (15/20). To underline how things have changed, in 2006 (when I moved to France) students used to applaud each other for getting higher than 60% (12/20) but now everything is ranked. Add in hormones and social media and anxiety… Lots of burn out and depression.
That hypothesis should be easy to verify by comparing against Belgian French speakers. We have largely the same culture and media intake, but our school system is much less focused on tests.
If anything we have the opposite problem, for budgetary reasons it has become nearly impossible to fail the standardized tests and as long as you get 10/20 it literally does not matter what the score was. I was in the first year when tests were introduced and they were so easy we did not even study for them.
The system as you describe it sounds a lot like the Italian one. That said, I just started studying French at the local Institut Francais and I must say that in general French people seem to take A LOT of things more seriously than the Italians do, for no good reason in my first instance opinion.
That sounds like a similar system to what the UK introduced after WW2. It was scrapped in most of the country in the 1970s for the downsides you’ve mentioned.
I never had to do it, but instead had to study why it was scrapped. I’m surprised it’s still a common system in highly developed countries such as France!
@Zombie @pasdechance of course it wasn’t *entirely* scrapped - two of my friends (both also teachers) have children in the Wirral and Bucks, both of which still have grammars. They hate it for the psychological pressure, the financial burden (it rewards rich kids who get tutors) and the difficulty for local non-grammars to meet targets without a normal mix of students.
Anecdotally: my mum passed and my uncle didn’t, and I suspect it’s affected their sibling dynamic ever since.
A few ideas: poverty is rising, violent crime is rising, TikTok and Instagram are extremely prevalent and most parents seem to let teenagers use them, schooling in France is inegalitarian and deterministic.
Can you expand on what you mean about the schooling?
France has objectively not great schools but also very high inequality of access to the top schools:
https://www.inegalites.fr/L-essentiel-des-inegalites-d-education-Rapport
https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/8242339?sommaire=8242421
And choosing your path in life is a very early choice and most if not all alternatives to the path to the top are dead ends (not literally but it takes a lot more time to catch up which costs extra money that people may not have): https://www.franceinfo.fr/societe/education/parcoursup/parcoursup/manque-d-informations-choix-trop-precoces-inegalites-quatre-chiffres-a-retenir-d-une-etude-sur-l-orientation-des-jeunes_7289151.html
https://www.banquedesterritoires.fr/cour-des-comptes-lorientation-une-politique-sans-boussole
https://shs.cairn.info/revue-administration-et-education-2021-3-page-35?lang=fr
Sorry all the sources are in French, DeepL does a good job usually, if you have questions I may be able to shed some light on stuff.
Wow, that’s dark! Not at all the same in Italy.
And thanks for the links in French! I am studying it and I just finished Clair Obscur in French, so I need more input.
