Students taking the baccalaureate exam must complete an essay, choosing amongst several possible philosophical and political themes. France 2 talks with some students about the experience, and asks some prominent politicians what they might have written if presented with the same task.

Meet a group of students as they prepare to take their baccalaureate test, a rite of passage for young French people on the cusp of adulthood. It can be a stressful time, but the students are pacing themselves well.

As a gift to journalists looking for a tongue-in-cheek story, French schools have banned kissing. Students ask, “Where’s the harm?”

Like the SATs for Americans, or A level in the UK, the baccalauréat exam, or le bac, creates more than its fair share of stress in students, especially on the day when they find out the results, the culmination of an entire school career. Students meet outside the school where exam results are posted, and share the emotion of knowing whether they and their friends succeeded or not.

Ten months of training go into learning to fly a helicopter, but less time is being spent aloft. More and more flight hours are logged in a hyper-realistic simulator that allows young pilots to hone their skills without ever leaving the earth.

The number of French students interested in studying Chinese has soared in French high schools in the last ten years. Though it is currently offered mostly by elite schools, the French government hopes to make it more accessible to all schools in years to come.

We’re back in Central Park! This time, French teens Barbara and Lorraine discuss politics, including the recent controversial Contrat Première Embauche and President Nicolas Sarkozy. (Love him or leave him? The girls don’t quite agree…)

Does your textbook ever seem more confusing than enlightening, more wrong than right? A recent study showed that some French textbooks could use a little fact-checking.

The French equivalent of ESL (English as a Second Language) is known as FLE (Français langue étrangère, or "French as a Foreign Language"). FLE is what you're learning right now, and it's what one of the women in this video is learning to teach.

Joanna shows us her tiny but surprisingly compact apartment. Her kitchen fits in a cupboard, and she has to climb a ladder to her cozy bedroom.

A group of high school friends from the Haute-Savoie town of Scionzier are trying to stop the destruction of a small farm building they discovered and restored. One of their efforts is the organization of a community yard sale for the town.

Caroline is an international business student with an interest in journalism. In this video, she talks to us about one of her school projects, which involved writing a supplement for the French magazine L'Express.

In the first episode of this documentary on Quebec, a young Frenchman shares his impressions on Canada. As the interviewees in the film demonstrate, the Quebecois have conflicting attitudes toward the French—some see them as "snobs," while others see them as just "polite."

In the second episode of Le Québec parle aux Français, we learn more about the complex relationship between the French and the Quebecois throughout history. We also learn about the evolution of the French language in Quebec—according to a former Prime Minister of Quebec, the province even "spoke French before France"!

The situation of the French language in Quebec is controversial and complex. Montreal was an English-speaking city until 1920, and it wasn't until the passage of Law 101 in 1977 that French became the official language of Quebec. According to some of the interviewees in this video, Québécois French is in a precarious position once again, with municipal signage and corporate names in Montreal reverting to English, as well as shopkeepers who refuse to speak French.