“Étudier est un droit qu’on ne négociera pas.” (Studying is a right we will not negotiate.)
The chant rose in Brussels. In neighboring France, students have taken to the streets demanding teachers, safe classrooms and conditions fit for learning.
That these demands should erupt into protests marked by violence and clashes in a cradle of the Enlightenment is a rude awakening for a society that helped define education as a public duty.
“Public instruction is a duty that society owes its citizens,” the French Enlightenment thinker Nicolas de Condorcet wrote more than two centuries ago. He saw education as a means of making equality of rights real.
Today’s students are asking whether that duty is being fulfilled.
How have countries that spend so much in the public’s name come to struggle with a responsibility so fundamental?
The grievances differ. In Brussels, students protested changes to university fees and funding that they fear will put higher education beyond poorer families’ reach. In France, high school students have complained of absent teachers, overloaded timetables and deteriorating buildings.
What connects them is the gap between a public promise and the education students actually receive.
The gap has become harder to close as governments confront the accumulated cost of earlier commitments. France has run a public deficit every year since 1975, according to its Court of Accounts. France and Belgium both recorded deficits exceeding 5 percent of gross domestic product in 2025, with public debt above 100 percent of GDP.
Borrowing alone does not establish waste. It has financed essential services and helped societies through crises. Nor can Europe’s student protests be explained by fiscal excess alone.
But decades of spending beyond revenue leave governments less room to respond when essential services fall short.
Existing commitments become politically difficult to change. Interest payments absorb resources. Repairs are postponed, and the cost of adjustment eventually reaches people who had no part in the original decisions.
Students should not inherit an education system whose promises have already been mortgaged.
Fiscal discipline therefore belongs in any serious defense of the right to education. Governments must preserve the capacity to deliver good schools through economic downturns and demographic change. That requires scrutinizing spending while choices remain, rather than waiting until financial pressure forces indiscriminate cuts.
Its local education grants are anchored to 20.79 percent of a defined domestic-tax base, supplemented by specified education-tax revenue. The formula protects school funding, but also ties it to tax receipts that can rise or fall independently of classroom needs.
The chip semiconductor windfall makes that test more urgent. Under the existing tax-linked formula, higher revenues from the chip boom would spill over into classroom budgets even as the school-age population shrinks.
Would that mean better teaching — or simply more laptops?
Seoul’s digital-device program, introduced under then-Superintendent Cho Hee-yeon, supplied more than 72,000 first-year middle school students with devices in 2022. Its success should be measured by what students learn, especially those who need the most support.
A semiconductor boom cannot determine what a classroom needs. Nor does giving every child the same device erase differences in parental support, access to private tutoring or the resources available to urban and rural schools. Falling enrollment creates opportunities for more individual attention, although the costs of teachers, buildings and transport do not decline automatically.
The continued reliance on private education makes accountability more pressing. Korean families spent 27.5 trillion won on private education in 2025. Although the total declined, more than three-quarters of students participated, and monthly spending among participants rose to 604,000 won.
Korean students perform strongly in international assessments. But public education should give children a credible chance to advance without requiring their parents to purchase expensive preparation after school. Any additional money reaching classrooms should be judged by how far it brings that promise within reach.
The government’s proposed grant reform, reflecting economic growth and demographic change while protecting against an annual decline in the grant total, deserves the same scrutiny. Education offices must justify how they would use a larger allocation. The central government must show that redirecting part of the windfall would improve educational opportunity elsewhere.
A temporary chip bonanza is an opportunity to strengthen education for the long term. Turning it into recurring commitments without evidence of their value would leave future students exposed when the cycle turns.
It is a lesson Korea should draw from Europe before its own students bear the cost of postponed choices.
Condorcet’s obligation remains ours. Children are owed capable teachers, safe classrooms and a fair opportunity to learn. They should receive that education without having to buy it a second time after school — or take to the streets to demand it.
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