Who Will Answer for the Dreams We Are Killing?

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We ask a child to study, to persevere, to succeed. We tell them that effort opens doors. And when they earn their place at university, we may shut the door in their face because our wages can’t stretch to a room in another city. It is not the child who has failed; it’s the promise we made to them as a society that has collapsed. Yet we still talk about equal opportunities.

In France, the protests over public education spotlight what it means to refuse to grow accustomed to neglect. Public school children are demonstrating and blockading schools, while university students have joined them, broadening the movement. These young people are demanding teachers and decent learning conditions. The government has now announced that it is seeking some 3,000 teachers to make available to the schools in greatest need. Student organizations are claiming an initial victory but refuse to stand down: a mere announcement is not enough to buy their silence.

That persistence has deep historical roots. In France in 1936, major workers’ strikes and the Popular Front negotiations were linked to gains such as collective bargaining agreements, the forty-hour week and paid leave. Rights took shape through social pressure and political decisions. History guarantees no victory for any movement today. But it reminds us that what we now take for granted once had to be fought for by people who refused to settle for what they were offered.

The French example confronts us with an uncomfortable question: where is our own sustained, collective pressure to improve public education? Individual protests do take place in Greece; what we lack is their convergence into a broad, organized effort on the part of parents, public school students, university students and teachers. One that promises to keep on fighting until announcements become action. One that does not end when the day of protest is over, or when a solution is found for our own school. One that imposes a political cost on the neglect of education which no government can ignore.

We have learned to privatize the system’s failures. Is support missing in primary school? The parent will try harder. Is preparation in secondary school inadequate? Those who can will pay. Is the rent for university out of reach? The dream will have to be downsized. Each private solution can save a child for a time, but leaves a broken system waiting for the next one down the line. And so the erosion of public education proceeds ever more quietly from primary to secondary to higher education. Public provision falls short, the family must make up the difference, and political responsibility disappears behind a closed door.

Yet even amid these failures, some students persevere. They put in the work, and they succeed. But just as they should finally be able to exhale, they are asked to prove they can actually afford the future they just earned. An acceptance letter doesn’t pay the rent, cover transit fares, or put food on the table. How much more resilience will we demand of a young person before we admit that their effort ends exactly where our collective responsibility should have begun?

The Rector of the University of Patras, Christos Bouras, reported that around 400 admitted students did not enroll this year, including nine accepted to study medicine. He linked the phenomenon to several causes, highlighting financial difficulties, high rents and transit costs. The Minister of Education stated that, nationwide, around one in twenty admitted students did not enroll. When students fail to enroll even for Medicine, the easy explanation that the problem concerns only low-demand programs or young people who never really wanted to study rings hollow. We do not know how many were excluded solely by financial factors. That distinction matters. But it does not diminish our responsibility toward those who wanted to study and could not afford their living costs.

Let us pause for a moment at that family table. With the child looking at the letter accepting them into their university program, and the parents doing the same sums again, hoping that this time they will add up. “We’ll find a way,” they struggle to say with confidence. But no parent should have to feel ashamed because their wages cannot bridge the distance between home and university. No child should have to feel their dream is a burden on the people they love.

The absence of tuition fees is not enough to make education genuinely free. When two young people earn a place on the same program, but only one can afford to live in the city where it is taught, their exam results have only opened the same door on paper. The state selected them through the exams. But then family income selects them all over again. And the one left outside is recorded as “not enrolled”, as though an administrative label could describe a life forced to change direction.

Housing allowances, student housing and free meals must be judged by whether they actually enable a young person to attend university. The state has a duty to know who is excluded for financial reasons and to ensure adequate support in time. Its responsibility cannot pass on to citizens simply because they did not protest enough. But society, too, cannot stop at feeling sorry for the child left outside of academia. It must demand specific commitments, check whether they are being implemented and return to the issue doggedly when they are not honored. Otherwise, the same story will rerun every autumn, with only the names changed.

If a business or a foundation offers scholarships, that help is valuable. But a child should not have to prove they will become a profitable investment to be entitled to an education. Nor should they have to wait for a sponsor to see a researcher of tomorrow in them. The welfare state must finally live up to its name. It must ensure that poverty does not cancel a place at university before a private donor steps in to fill the gap it has left. Private initiative can contribute; it cannot become an alibi for state abandonment. Every scholarship that saves a dream matters. But it does not erase the responsibility for those left without support. And a country that expects to produce scientists and researchers must support their studies and the conditions in which they work. How many children will we leave waiting for an exception, instead of guaranteeing them a right?

In East of Eden, John Steinbeck regards the free human mind that searches and explores as the most precious thing in the world. This is the freedom education must nurture. It must give young people the knowledge and courage to question even us. Their financial realities should not dictate the limits of their imagination. A democracy that tolerates exclusion from education is a democracy that stifles the voices that might one day set it right.

That collective resistance has yet to be built. It is not enough for us to be indignant at home individually, or to expect a teacher, a parents’ association or a high school student to shoulder the burden alone. The struggles from grade school to university need to be connected, with shared demands and sustained action. The parent who can afford to pay today must demand public education for the child of the parent who cannot. The student who has made it into the lecture hall must also fight for the one who is absent. We must stop only defending a right for as long as it affects us personally.

If our individual acts of resistance find one another, they can form a constellation of resistances: scattered voices connected by a collective demand for public education. Then our anguish can reach beyond the threshold of our homes. It can travel from neighborhood to neighborhood, unite schools and lecture halls, and acquire the staying power and the numbers that compel those in power to answer. This is what we need to build. This is where I can see a crack of light: in a society that will demand room for all its children, even when our own have already found their way.
When we undermine education, we decide who will have the means to shape the future and who will simply have to endure it. I dream of future generations being able to imagine what we have stopped believing possible. Of their having the knowledge to challenge the injustices we hand down to them, and the strength to fight for a better world. For a Greece where no child must lower their eyes when speaking of their future, for fear it will cost too much. This is the Greece we need. And for it to exist, we must start fighting for it together.

To deny genuine access to free education is to crush aspirations. It extinguishes the futures some young people dared to plan, and teaches those who follow not to even try. A generation does not owe us smaller dreams to fit within our failings. Who will take responsibility? The child who tried? The parents who could not afford to pay? Or the state and the society that allowed a right to become a privilege?