When Mathilde discovers that she won the honors in the baccalaureate, last July 5, she does not feel any relief strangely. If usually obtaining the precious sesame marks the culmination of fifteen years of schooling and entry into the big leagues of higher education, this year it is rather a “bitter taste” which is home to many high school students. For the young baccalaureate, who is preparing to integrate an LAS in biology in Toulouse (Haute-Garonne) from the start of the school year, apprehension dominates: “It’s a chapter that is closing, but I’m already starting to fear for next year.”
Despite the surge of the seventh wave of Covid-19 this summer, the start of the school year on September 1 will be face-to-face. Two years ago, however, a generation of high school students found themselves stuck at home, far from friends and classrooms. “When our parents talked to us about high school, that’s not at all what we had in mind”regrets Colyne, a student at the University of Talence (Gironde). “We expected the best years of our lives”abounds Angelin, student in eco-management in Pessac, near Bordeaux (Gironde). “When we think we spent half of it in our room, it’s sad”. Isolation, loss of bearings, permanent stress… On the eve of the return to class, baccalaureate holders and former final year students told us how they experienced this pivotal period.
Thursday March 12, 2020, 8 p.m. President Emmanuel Macron announces during a televised speech the confinement of the population and the closure of schools “until further notice”. Having no idea what awaits them, some exult. “We were just happy not to have class”, sums up Céleste, a former high school student in the Forest of Montargis (Loiret). But as the weeks pass and the confinement sets in, the anxiety begins to mount.
The students then discover distance learning, like their teachers. Overnight, they have to take control of digital tools and find themselves unequally equipped to work in unprecedented conditions. “The teachers did what they wanted”, remembers Colyne, a former student of the Pape-Clément high school in Pessac. Regular videoconference lessons on the one hand, the massive sending of pages of handouts on the other… For many high school students, this disorganization and this imposed isolation are sources of stress.
In these troubled times, what would happen to the end-of-year exams? For Celeste, who was to pass the French baccalaureate in June 2020, the questions abound. “A fortnight before the tests, we hadn’t finished the program at all and we lacked a lot of texts to work on.she says. We were all very worried.”
The bedroom suddenly replaced the classroom and the computer became the main tool for following lessons. Work habits change, the pace too. “Not always easy to mark a cut“, recounts Maël, a baccalaureate from Gironde who remembers whole days spent between his desk and his bed. Overwhelmed by the load of homework demanded by the teachers in each discipline, he recounts having suffered from a lack of sleep throughout his year. of a second.
“I turned on my computer at 7 a.m., when I woke up, to work. And I only turned it off at midnight, when I went to bed.”
Maël, baccalaureate from Girondeat franceinfo
The exercise is all the more complicated as at home, it is not always easy to live together. Pauline, Celeste’s former classmate in Montargis, remembers a “adjustment time” the first weeks of confinement. “I was attending both video lessons, then I had to help my brothers and sisters.œurs on their homework, so I had to postpone my own work.” You also have to learn to deal with new constraints: lack of space and noise. “We had to redesign some rooms in the house to be able to work while others slept.”
Blocked at home, high school students must put an end to all the “going out with friends”. Instead, we have to settle for relationships “from a distance”, “by message” and on networks. “We were together all the time: during our hole hours, at recess… With confinement, overnight, we lost this interaction with our close friends”remembers Pauline.
As a result, many young people feel like they missed out on part of the high school experience. “The year and the summer of second were stolen from us. It feels like we’ve been trapped”, regrets Mathilde, who recalls that in 2020, the courses were spread out until the end of July. Same regret for Milo, who obtained his baccalaureate this year: “The second is the freedom of high school without exams. There, I regret not having been able to take advantage of it.” In general, explains Orane, young bachelor, “it was difficult to enjoy our high school years because we were in a permanent state of stress”.
These episodes of estrangement from the classroom also lead high school students to live every day with their families and parents, “in a period when they would, on the contrary, need to detach themselves from it”explains Rachel Bocher, head of the psychiatry department 5 of the Nantes University Hospital.
“This isolation can have significant consequences on the sociability of young people, who are in full development. This can in particular push them to reach out less to others.”
Rachel Bocher, psychiatrist at Nantes University Hospitalat franceinfo
Anna*, who passed the baccalaureate this year at the Acajou 2 high school in Martinique, remembers having difficulty reconnecting socially with his comrades when he returned to first year, face-to-face. “Interacting with everyone, speaking, going to the board… We had lost the habit”, she explains. The same feeling for Célia, a first-year student in social sciences at the Catholic Institute of Paris, who today admits “going less easily towards others at university”.
In some cases, the anxiety caused by the Covid-19 crisis, and more broadly the current global situation, can lead to deeper malaise. This is the case of the young student from the Ile-de-France. In high school, she had to take treatment to cope with a depressive episode. “Without that, I would not have had the strength to pass the baccalaureate”, she explains. Like Célia, many young people have emerged psychologically weakened by the pandemic. A report by the Defender of Rights published in November 2021 notes that the confinement has resulted in a “general rise” depressive syndromes, which even doubled among 15-24 year olds. The study states that “10% of them presented a depressive syndrome in 2019 against more than 20% in 2020”.
Back to school in September 2020. After strict confinement and a summer of relaxation of health restrictions, high school students are returning to high school benches, masked. “It was weird not even seeing the faces of the teachers”remembers Colyne. “Already the return to class was brutal, having to wear the mask from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. was complicated”adds Pauline.
But the 100% face-to-face does not last very long. From November, the resurgence of cases led to new government measures and hybrid education made its appearance, once again distancing students from classes. “From a social point of view, it cut the class in two”, recalls Milo. One week out of two remotely, one day out of two in the presence… Depending on the establishments, the formulas vary. For the students, this alternation imposes changes in the pace of work that are not always easy to assimilate.
“The fact of chaining weeks in class and at home made us accumulate a lot of fatigue. Once again, we felt like objects that we walked around to learn things.”
Pauline, studentat franceinfo
During two years of implementation of the baccalaureate reform, the lack of clarity and information on the holding of exams, conditioned on the health situation, added a factor of stress and anxiety for high school students who saw the deadlines to get closer “without knowing concretely how the tests were going to take place”. Also having the feeling of having been “abandoned” to define their desires and choose their post-baccalaureate orientation, many of them are now apprehensive about higher education. “With the Covid, the student fairs were done by video, it was not ideal for asking questions and interacting with the students”, regrets Colyne. Results, “the future scares them”explains psychiatrist Rachel Bocher.
Once passed the baccalaureate, apprehension continues to follow them to the benches of the university. In the first year, many young people tell “discover” the concept of “multi-week review periods” with the partials. “It’s already stressful for the L1s, but for us it’s even more so because we’ve never experienced that.explains Celia. These are the real first exams we do.”
While some have already started their university course, what memories will these young people keep of their high school years? When we ask them the question, many struggle to answer. “My phone’s photo gallery contains almost no second memories. Just class screenshots”, realizes Angelin. With hindsight, there are many images that come back: that of “masked faces” or time spent “behind the computer”symbols of a truncated piece of youth and the regret of not having been able to live this period fully.
* The first name has been changed at the request of the person concerned.