It started with students asking for more teachers.
In September, students at a school outside Paris joined their teachers to protest overcrowded classrooms, absent staff, and inadequate resources. The demonstrations spread across France. What began as a complaint about the conditions in which young people were expected to learn grew into a wider expression of frustration about living costs, public services, and the direction of the country. By last weekend, some demonstrations had descended into riots. Cars burned, businesses were looted, and police and protesters were injured.
The violence deserves condemnation. Destroying a shop or attacking a police officer will not put another teacher in a classroom. But amid the images of flames and shattered windows, I wondered.
What happened to the students who wanted more teachers?
I spend a considerable part of my life thinking about future readiness. What young people need to know. What they should be able to do. How they can develop the curiosity, confidence, and adaptability to navigate a world that is changing faster than our institutions can keep up. At the Future Ready Festival in Bengaluru last weekend, I spent two days exploring these questions with students, parents, educators, and university leaders.
I believe deeply in this work. But watching France, I began wondering whether I have been asking only half the question.
We spend an extraordinary amount of time asking whether young people are ready for the future. How much time do we spend asking whether the rest of us are ready for them?
Consider the advice we give. Be resilient. Adapt to change. Learn continuously. Develop an entrepreneurial mindset. Think critically. Take responsibility for your own future. These are valuable qualities, and I would never discourage a young person from cultivating them.
But somewhere along the way, resilience seems to have become our answer to problems we are unwilling to solve.
Can’t find meaningful employment? Upskill. Can’t afford a home? Adjust your expectations. Your degree hasn’t opened the doors you were promised? Reinvent yourself. Your school hasn’t prepared you? Take ownership of your learning. Artificial intelligence is transforming the work you hoped to do? Become more adaptable.
Each response contains a measure of truth. The world owes nobody certainty, and personal responsibility matters. Yet when adaptation becomes our universal answer to institutional shortcomings, we simply shift the burden from the institutions creating or perpetuating those conditions to the people living with them.
Then we congratulate ourselves for teaching them how to cope.
I don’t believe the protests unfolding around the world can be reduced to a single generational revolt. France is not Morocco, and Morocco is not Nepal. Their histories, grievances, and political circumstances differ. Nor should we mistake the violence of some participants for the intentions of everyone who takes to the streets. Romanticizing unrest is no more useful than dismissing it.
Still, beneath these different expressions of discontent lies a question worth confronting. What happens when the relationship between effort and opportunity begins to lose credibility?
For generations, we offered young people an imperfect but reassuring bargain. Study hard, work diligently, follow the rules, and you stand a reasonable chance of building a better life. It was never equally available to everyone, and it was never guaranteed. But it made sacrifice seem worthwhile. It gave education a promise beyond the classroom.
That promise feels increasingly fragile. Qualifications do not necessarily lead to work that provides security. Technology creates new possibilities while unsettling familiar career paths. Housing and the cost of living place independence beyond the reach of many who have done what was asked of them. And when young people express frustration, they are often reminded that earlier generations faced hardship too, as though suffering were a competition that could settle the argument.
Maybe we should stop asking whether they have it harder than we did and start asking whether the bargain we continue to offer is one we can still honor.
The OECD’s 2026 survey of trust in public institutions found that only 34 percent of respondents across participating OECD countries were confident that governments adequately balance the interests of current and future generations. That is not just a complaint about one particular leader. It suggests a troubling uncertainty about whether the people making decisions today take seriously those who must live with them tomorrow.
We have developed elaborate ways to measure the readiness of young people: examinations, grades, credentials, employability scores, competencies, and portfolios of achievement. But what would it mean to measure the future readiness of an institution?
Imagine evaluating a university by how effectively it evolves with its students rather than how successfully it protects its traditions. Imagine judging employers not only by the talent they recruit, but by the potential they develop. Imagine holding governments accountable for whether the choices they make today expand or restrict the possibilities available to the next generation.
I can already hear the objections. Institutions have budgets. Governments must reconcile competing interests. Employers cannot guarantee jobs. And young people themselves will not always agree, nor will they always be right. All true. But none of it excuses us from asking whether those institutions are capable of changing as quickly as they expect everyone else to change.
We have also become really good at diverting attention from that question.
As the unrest in France intensified, explanations emerged that had little to do with the students’ original demands. In American political commentary, the disorder was linked to Muslim migrants and the supposed dangers of immigration, despite the lack of evidence that these groups were responsible for the unrest. The subject shifted from the condition of schools and public services to the identity of people living in France.
Immigration, public safety, and integration are legitimate issues for public debate. Laws matter. Violence and criminal behavior require accountability, whoever commits them. But there is an enormous difference between holding people responsible for their actions and assigning blame to entire communities based on religion or where they came from.
As an immigrant who has spent most of his adult life in America, I find that distinction impossible to ignore. I’ve watched economic anxiety become suspicion of outsiders, cultural uncertainty turn into questions about who belongs, and legitimate disagreement become a reason to distrust people who worship differently. The anxieties may be real. But a convenient scapegoat is not the same thing as an explanation.
What must this look like to a young person listening to the adults in the room?
We ask students to practice empathy, appreciate diversity, challenge stereotypes, and collaborate across cultures. We tell them that critical thinking means looking beyond the most emotionally satisfying answer. Then they watch public arguments in which suspicion travels faster than evidence and a person’s identity is offered as an explanation for someone else’s actions.
Maybe the problem isn’t that our young people haven’t learned the lessons. Maybe it’s that the adults teaching them haven’t demonstrated what those lessons look like beyond the classroom.
There is a difference between preparing someone to participate in a society and allowing them to influence what that society becomes. We celebrate student voice, but too often what we mean is that young people may speak while adults retain the right to decide whether anything changes. We invite them onto panels, ask for their opinions, applaud their passion, and return to business as usual.
Meaningful participation is harder. It requires sharing authority, accepting disagreement, and allowing younger people to affect decisions that matter. Not because youth guarantees wisdom, but because decisions about the future are incomplete when those who will inhabit it are consistently treated as spectators.
Future readiness cannot remain a course we teach children while the rest of society considers itself exempt. Schools have to be ready to reconsider how they educate. Universities have to be ready to defend the value they create. Employers have to be ready to rethink how they recognize and develop talent. Governments have to be ready to consider consequences that extend far beyond the next electoral cycle. And all of us have to become more comfortable with the possibility that the next generation will question not only our decisions, but our assumptions.
Those students in France began by asking for better conditions in which to learn. The turmoil that followed has raised much larger questions about public trust, social cohesion, and the obligations we owe one another. The answers will not be found in burned cars, nor in pretending that all anger is justified. They will not be found in blaming entire communities for the actions of individuals, either.
They begin with a question we have avoided for too long: what are we willing to change in ourselves and our institutions before we ask young people to change once again?
We cannot keep telling the next generation to take ownership of its future while insisting on owning every decision that shapes it.
For all our talk of future readiness, perhaps the people most urgently in need of it are the ones who believe their preparation is already complete.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
