France's Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu has suspended high school classes across France for the rest of the week as protests demanding education reforms continue to sweep the country, Al Jazeera reports.
Police fired tear gas at protesters blockading high schools on Tuesday as hundreds of thousands rallied in a number of cities calling for improvements to the education system, including replacing absent teachers, making lunch breaks longer and changing the length of the school day.
Authorities put the number of protesters nationwide at about a quarter of a million, but organisers estimated the number of students and activists at closer to half a million. The High School Students Union said nearly 2,000 high schools were blockaded or closed for the day.
Reporting from a march in the capital, Paris, Al Jazeera’s Natacha Butler said a growing number of groups had joined the demonstrations.
“We’re seeing people from various unions – like the farmers’ union, energy workers, teachers’ unions – who’ve also said they’re going to come out in support of the students,” said Butler.
“Parents and teachers said they want to be here not just to support their children but to protect them as they are worried about troublemakers who may infiltrate the protests and excessive police force,” added Butler.
In the cities of Marseille, Nantes and Lyon, demonstrators took to the streets holding aloft signs which read “they don’t really care about us” and “survive or study”.
