High school hangs up as AI enrolls

On Tuesday, September 1, a tenth grader will walk through the gates of a French high school carrying a phone he is no longer allowed to take out of his pocket. Where he puts it, at what point in the day, and under whose eye all depend on his school's rulebook, which may or may not have been voted on over the summer.

That is what survives of the Miller law. On August 14, France's Constitutional Council struck down its Article 1, the one banning social media for under-15s after eighteen months of argument. Article 6 was bolted on somewhere along the way, debated by almost nobody, and named in neither petition. It takes effect while the other article goes back for rewriting.

The article nobody bothered to challenge

The sixty deputies from the France Insoumise bloc and the sixty Socialists who went to the Council were aiming at the social media ban, and the Council rules only on what lands in front of it. Article 6 crossed August without a judge so much as glancing at it, which means the least argued provision in the text is the only one students will actually meet in September^[1]. It extends to high schools what has applied to elementary and middle schools since 2018, phones and connected devices alike, bell to bell.

The ministry had not waited for the ruling. On July 2, education minister Édouard Geffray signed a circular setting out the ban and providing that if the law were not signed into force in time, the principle would go into each school's rulebook instead^[2]. A minister who drafts the fallback for his own law before the constitutional court has spoken shows a caution Parliament could have borrowed.

Banned everywhere except where the rulebook says otherwise

Which leaves the question that sank everything in July, the question of how. The law states the principle and hands the details to the rulebook, adopted by each school's governing board after the student council has been consulted. Teaching uses are still allowed, so are uses the school needs to function, and students with disabilities keep their equipment. Penalties run from detention to confiscation, up to a full disciplinary hearing in the worst cases^[3].

One national ban will therefore produce as many local bans as there are high schools. In some, phones will be barred from buildings and hallways but tolerated in the yard, which hands the hall monitors a border to police at every break. One principal interviewed this summer reckoned it would take close to a year before the measure really applies, once boards have voted and someone has worked out where the phones go.

A month ago I wrote that a law banning something without saying by what means looks a lot like an intention. The Council struck down Article 1 for exactly that. Article 6 has the same defect and nobody will contest it, because a teenager parted from his phone makes a less compelling plaintiff than an adult ordered to show ID.

Middle school already ran the rehearsal

We already know how this goes, because middle schools ran it last year. The phone-parking scheme reached all of them in September 2025, each one picking its own method, shared lockers, boxes, or individual pouches^[4]. SNPDEN-UNSA, the main union of school heads, measured the result a few weeks later. Nine percent of middle schools had put the scheme in place. Two thirds flatly refused, and a quarter were waiting to hear what their department would decide.

The refusal is not hard to explain. Equipping five thousand middle schools costs 130 million euros, at roughly ten euros a pouch, and that bill lands on the departments, which the central government never funded. Jérôme Dumont, who runs the Meuse department and speaks for the national association of departments, put it as a question, why build an elaborate contraption when the education code already bans phones^[5]. It is a hard argument to brush off, since the 2018 law never lacked firmness, only locks.

High schools inherit the same problem with a different payer, the regions this time, and a tighter calendar, given that the circular reached them three weeks before the summer break. December will tell us how many governing boards got around to voting.

The same morning AI joins the syllabus

While the school confiscates one screen at the door, it opens another in class. The Pix AI course becomes mandatory this year for eighth graders, tenth graders in the general and technical track, and first-year vocational students, more than 1.5 million students a year^[6]. Two courses of thirty to forty-five minutes, cut into modules of seven to ten, cover how generative systems work, bias, disinformation, deepfakes, environmental cost, and how to talk to these tools. The ministry tried it out from September to December 2025 in a hundred and forty schools with seven thousand students.

Forty-five minutes a year to grasp what is currently rearranging work, reading, and the writing of anything at all is not much. It is also forty-five minutes more than most of the adults legislating on the subject ever got. I would rather a tenth grader be shown how a model assembles a plausible sentence than be told once more to distrust it, because reasoning travels better than recipes and it ages more slowly.

Both decisions hold up on their own, and together they send a message I do not envy the teachers who have to deliver it.

What waits at the gate

My daughter is still at the age where we pass a controller back and forth, and high school remains an abstraction to me. The calendar is not. In two months French lawmakers have banned social media without saying who would check anyone's age, then phones without saying who would hold them, and a third attempt is already promised for spring 2027.

By the time she pushes through that gate, the rule will have changed more than once. What I would like her to find is something other than a rulebook thrown together in July and an invoice forwarded to whichever authority comes next. Forty-five minutes of Pix will not be enough either, but of the three measures it is the only one that will teach her anything.