France is ablaze (again). Limoges’s nineteenth-century town hall was set on fire and declared largely lost. The prefect’s residence in Bordeaux was ransacked. The Galeries Lafayette were looted and, in the words of the mayor of Paris, entire streets ‘methodically wrecked’.

This is what happens when a society treats the lycéen – a creature of dubious pilosity who cannot legally buy a beer – as an oracle

This is what happens when a society treats the lycéen – a creature of dubious pilosity who cannot legally buy a beer – as an oracle

We could expend many words analysing why: a failing justice system, a lack of political courage, the left’s insurrectionist tendencies. But one underestimated reason is the rise of the Child King. This, in essence, is what happens when a society treats the lycéen (the student) – a creature of dubious pilosity who cannot legally buy a beer – as an oracle.

None of this came from nowhere. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile, or On Education first cast the child as another version of his noble savage: a creature still free of corruption, imbued with natural wisdom, a symbol to be cherished, listened to, and imitated. Children, therefore, must not be told what to do, but given free rein. A. S. Neill, in Summerhill, gave that disastrous........

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