Lecornu Makes Cabinet Take France’s Underfunded-School Final Exam

PARIS — In a fictional response to France’s school-protest crisis, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has ordered every cabinet minister to spend one complete weekday inside the public-school conditions they have spent the week describing from conference rooms with functioning climate control.

The emergency program, called Écoutez Pour Une Fois, or “Listen for Once,” began at 7:42 a.m., when ministers were deposited outside a lycée carrying identical paper folders, no aides and one government-issued pen that had already stopped working.

“This is not punishment,” Lecornu said, standing beneath a banner reading WELCOME, MINISTERS: YOUR TEACHER IS OUT TODAY. “It is a rigorous fact-finding exercise designed to determine whether a classroom of 39 students, one unavailable teacher and a radiator making submarine noises can truly affect learning outcomes.”

By 8:15, the answer had been entered into the official record as “apparently.”

The first complication came during attendance. Education Minister Édouard Geffray was marked absent after leaving to brief reporters about the importance of uninterrupted instruction. The school had no substitute available, so the budget minister was told to cover geometry while continuing negotiations over national spending cuts from the back of the room.

“I was handed a dry-erase marker and asked to explain triangles to people who can see through me,” the budget minister told a cafeteria worker during lunch. “This is not how fiscal discipline was supposed to feel.”

The cafeteria worker nodded and reminded him that lunch had ended six minutes earlier.

Several ministers initially attempted to regain authority by forming a crisis committee around the classroom printer, which had displayed the words TONER LOW before refusing to participate further in the democratic process. The interior minister proposed a firm response. The culture minister suggested a listening session with the printer. The printer, sources said, enjoyed the first meeting in months where nobody asked it to produce 400 color copies of a national strategy document by 9 a.m.

Then came the heat.

When the temperature in Room 214 climbed high enough for the transport minister’s briefing notes to curl at the edges, the cabinet’s public line on “temporary discomfort” began to evolve. A deputy minister who had earlier called complaints about buildings “a matter requiring calm and perspective” requested calm, perspective, water and immediate international observers.

Lecornu’s office issued a statement praising the ministers’ resilience and confirming that no one would be dismissed from government for leaving the room without permission, provided they signed out on the clipboard hanging beneath a broken fire alarm.

At noon, the exercise took an unexpected turn. Asked to prepare a short presentation on the causes of the protests, ministers produced a 46-slide deck blaming social media, radicalization, outside agitators, the national mood, international instability and a “generalized unwillingness to appreciate administrative complexity.”

The students assigned to evaluate the presentation gave it a 4 out of 20 for failing to answer the question.

That grade triggered a second crisis meeting.

Government officials immediately opened an inquiry into whether the student evaluators had been politically manipulated by anyone with access to the assignment sheet. The inquiry stalled when investigators discovered that the assignment sheet had been written by the government, the government had selected the rubric, and the government had placed the cabinet in a room where its own answers could be heard out loud.

By late afternoon, ministers had organized what they insisted was not a protest but a “spontaneous interministerial expression of operational concern.” They blocked the faculty-room door with three folding chairs and demanded more staff, fewer hours, usable facilities and a person who could explain why the online university-admissions portal required a password containing a symbol nobody had ever seen.

Lecornu arrived to calm them down, only to find his entire cabinet chanting, with the discipline of people who had just discovered collective bargaining, “WE HAVE A FUTURE TO FUND, NOT A SPREADSHEET TO ENDURE.”

The prime minister agreed to hear their grievances once they returned to class.

Unfortunately, the next period was civics, and the cabinet had a test on who exactly was responsible for the budget.