There's no such thing in France, maybe you're mistaken with some Nordic countries?

Edit : I was talking about the traffic fines.

Source : I'm French, which may explain my broken English.

> maybe you're mistaken with some Nordic countries?

I think it's switzerland [0]

[0] http://www.rts.ch/info/suisse/1118676-bientot-des-amendes-se...

School is free until high school in France, and university can be considered as free as well, because it is extremely cheap compared to the USA/Canada/UK for example, and because there is plenty of help to students with low resources.

> School is free until high school in France

Friendly fyi: "until" is generally exclusive in English. An similar word that is inclusive is "through". So "I'm on vacation until Monday" implies they will be in the office on Monday, but "I'm on vacation through Monday" implies they will be back Tuesday. I understood what you meant, but for a moment I thought you were saying that you had to pay for highschool in France.

France, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Poland, (etc ...) what's the difference when you're not from the EU ? =)

French school isn't free, you're just basically paying it afterwards, threw many taxes including personnal income based taxes.

I'm french and paying taxes so that all children - including those from underprivileged environments - have, at least in theory, access to a free education is one thing I'm quite proud of.

Who said you should have not to be proud? Proudness apart, your school is still not "free, as in beer".

You didn't say that, as actually I'm not proud of anything related to nationality (it was a reference to the first post in the thread). What I meant is that in the particular case of the education system, the contribution system you mentioned allows socially deprived people to actually access the education system for free, as in beer.

So actually we're complementing each other: access to school is free for every one, but school isn't free for the citizen. My point was to say that "free school" should not be mentioned, instead we should speak of "school paid by taxed citizens for everyone" which is more accurate.

Well, you've already understood: I'm french too ;)

Agreed :)

Yeap, they're basically free and it shows. Most universities have buildings that make you feel like living in a post-apocalyptic world.