French Toast (17 page)

Why leave a discussion of the French educational system
to the end of these little reflections on French society?
Very frankly, a child's education is always a subject of
passion, and when you are putting your child in a foreign school
system, the subject becomes explosive. It may have taken me
a long time to get used to certain cultural differences,
but the one in which I have been the most personally involved,
for my children's sake, was that of education. The differences
between my education in the United States and my children's
education in French public schools were, very simply,
like night and day. It took a lot of getting used to.
And now that they are nearing the end of their
education . . . well, read on.

I decided that since their father was French and we were living in France, it would only be logical to send my two sons to French schools.

I didn't know it then, but I was in for a big change. First of all, although I speak fluent French, I realized that I would be of little or no help to my children when it came to the finer points of French grammar. I also realized that in a country where parents spend endless hours helping their kids with homework, I was an exception, feeling that it was more important for them to understand through their own mistakes. Helping with homework is so widespread that many French teachers will not accept typed papers because they fear that the work will be that of the parents, not the students. My inability to help my children turned out to be fortunate. They did the work themselves.

Second, I learned that in France, school is taken very seriously from day one. Students spend a lot of time studying and school is for learning, not for extracurricular activities.

The importance of school cannot be overestimated. Franco-American marriage counselor Jill Bourdais points out that in France “the cultural assumption is that children are supposed to spend all their time studying. In the States, parents want children to be well rounded. In France, kids have to do well in school or it's death. Schoolwork is a problem anywhere, but worse here for a Franco-American couple because of
the cultural assumption toward this work and its importance.”

Of all the things I learned, the most important one is the following valuable truism:
American mothers with children in French schools are much more traumatized by the whole experience than their kids are
. I italicize because this axiom turned out, I am convinced, to be the key to my own children's success in this system. My expectations of French schools were typically American. My children would learn, of course, but not just from books. Sports and music, debate and drama—all would play an important part. Teachers would never overtly criticize them or make them feel bad. And if something unpleasant happened, well, I would hightail it to the school and have a friendly little conversation with the teacher.

It just doesn't work that way in French schools. Teachers criticize students! Bad grades are given! School is work with a capital
W!
As an American mother of kids in French schools, I absolutely could not comprehend what was going on at school and decided to get my husband on the case—after all, he had gone through the system. Shouldn't he be the one to deal with it?

This decision turned out to be a miraculous stroke of good judgment. Suddenly, problems that had seemed insurmountable were cut down to size. As only a Frenchman with a command of the language and its nuances could, he would size up a situation, decide when
it was worthwhile to intervene, and then do so with such aplomb, such perfect word choice, such lack of emotionalism, and such
sang-froid
that I was literally bowled over. “Leave the French educational system to those who have been through it!” I tell my friends. You won't believe what will happen.

A case in point: One day, a gym teacher accused my younger son of being sneaky, underhanded. We were very upset—first because of the public nature of the accusation and, second, because he had struggled with minor physical-coordination problems and we were afraid he would get down on gym and lose his self-confidence. I sent my husband to the school. Suddenly, there were no more complaints and gym seemed to be going all right. “What did you say to her?” I inquired. “I just told her that David hadn't spent five years of his life attending coordination-training sessions so that some gym teacher would mess it all up,” he related calmly. But it wasn't just what he had said; it was the way he'd said it,
tout en finesse
. She got the message.

But even with a French husband to pave the way, there were many things I didn't know. I didn't know, for example, that if you even
think
you're going to have a baby, you sign him up for nursery school. I didn't know that little French kids routinely trot off to school at
age two
. So I was late, very late, and my first child didn't get into nursery school until the ripe old age of three.

Not having done what I was supposed to do, I had a
hard time. But politics finally prevailed in the form of a letter to the mayor of the sixteenth arrondissement, where I lived. “Dear sir,” I penned, “I find it hard to believe that my son, Benjamin, who is now
two and a half
, has been deprived of six months of education. Surely something can be done for this poor child.” Presto! By some miracle, a place was found in a school in our neighborhood. French politicians, like American ones, hate to disappoint their constituents.

Actually, this is a great system, especially for mothers who work. It's hard to see your little two-year-old wail as you leave him behind, but it gives mothers some valuable time from 9:00
A.M.
to 4:00
P.M.
In addition, the school organizes child care on the school premises from 4:00
P.M.
to 6:00
P.M.
so mothers who work in offices actually have an entire day to work and not have to pay a baby-sitter.

French nursery schools are probably the greatest invention of this system, not only for that reason but because the children themselves are generally pretty happy to get out of the house and be in a group of kids their own age.

The first time you leave your child is the hardest. Benjamin's school wasn't quite close enough to home for me to get him at noon, so it was decided that he would stay from 9:00
A.M.
to 4:00
P.M.
On the fateful first day, I led my blond, blue-eyed wee one to the school in fear and trepidation. Huge iron gates clanged
shut and scores of tots cried their hearts out as they fastened their little bodies to the gates. Each and every one of those little tykes wanted his or her
maman
! Filled with guilt, I carried the image of my son's huge tear-filled eyes with me all day long. How could you abandon your child to school at that age?

I returned at the end of that long day, vowing to take him home with me until he was, say, five, a “normal” age for children to go to school. His teacher, a pretty, lively red-haired young woman, told me not to worry. After the initial shock of leaving his mother, Benjamin, it turned out, had a great time riding a tricycle and sleeping.

With one year of school under his belt, Benjamin, at the ripe old age of three years and eight months, was ready to start his second year of nursery school. This was the beginning of No More Messing Around. The first day, he wandered behind the school to play in the sandpile with a little comrade. The teacher didn't discover his absence until two hours later. Benjamin was so traumatized that he cried for two straight hours once he got home that night. I thought he would never go back to school again.

But he did. Meanwhile, the teacher who had lost him called me in and said, “Madame, your child is having drawing difficulties,” which was a rather polite way of saying that his drawings were just plain weird. It turned out that they were entirely BLACK (probably his vision of school after having been lost the first day).

The next year at the venerable age of four and eight months, Benjamin got a conventional teacher of the old-school variety. Predictably, she had gray hair worn in a chignon. She scared
me
. Our contacts were limited to my timid questions about Benjamin's progress and her monosyllabic responses. But this was the year Benjamin learned to write, forming endless rows of
o
's,
l
's and
la
's and
li
's, sitting straight at his desk and not moving, the way little French children are taught to do. (Have you ever noticed how straight the French hold themselves, as opposed to the slouchy postures we Americans tend to adopt? This comes from years and years of teachers telling the students to sit up straight every time they get into a contorted position.)

By the time he entered primary school, he was thoroughly prepared to write, and write neatly—no light matter in a country where children are still expected, in many places, to write with fountain pens. Yes, fountain pens. As an American mother, it seemed logical to me that if a child is just learning to write, he should write with a pencil with an eraser so he would be able to rub out his mistakes—or a ballpoint or anything except a fountain pen, which is bound to create a mess.

No way.

My younger son, as I mentioned, had some coordination difficulties, which meant that writing with a fountain pen was extremely difficult and frustrating for him
and all the pages of his notebooks were totally botched up. When I suggested that we just skip the fountain pen and have him write with a pencil or a ballpoint, the teachers—both at the public school he attended and at his special classes for handwriting—looked at me as if I were certifiably insane. Even when some of his teachers were sympathetic to his problem, they never relaxed their own standards of neatness. They hoped, obviously, to bring him “up” to these standards just as they would bring “up” a student who is poor in geography. In the end, they did.

The fountain pen story points out both the good and the bad side of French education. The good side is that the school nurse, during the regular yearly checkup, noticed that David was not physically coordinated and told both the teacher and us about it. The second time she tested him, she recommended we send him to special classes for handwriting problems. We did, two sessions a week for three years, and never spent a cent on it.

The downside was that, with the exception of two wonderful teachers, the other four he had in elementary school were, shall we say, not overly sympathetic to his problem.

But this may have its own logic in a system that is very strict. I mentioned my amazement about the whole issue of the fountain pen to his fifth-grade teacher, whom I liked and respected very much. I thought that, because she was so good with children, she might agree with me
that the battle was really inane in the end. After all, she was one of the two teachers who told David he was great and who gave him the self-confidence he needed to write neatly.

Her reaction was not what I expected. She agreed that it is hard for children to write with a fountain pen at first. “But,” she said, “we must teach them to confront difficulty; they need personal discipline. It isn't because a fountain pen is difficult that we should do away with the pen.”

And that, for me, is the French system in a nutshell. Difficulties are there to be surmounted, not to be made easier. Concomitantly, this means, for the moment at least, that French students can't wiggle their way out of physics, chemistry, math, and all those “hard” subjects that students in the United States can manage to avoid for the rest of their lives after taking the bare minimum. Having been one of those students who cleverly managed to get out of anything too difficult and, notably, anything scientific, I tip my hat to a system where high school graduates have all been made to take the same basic fare—math, physics, chemistry, history, French, foreign languages, biology—for four years.

Many French parents are worried that the educational system is going down the drain; many yank their kids out of public schools and put them in private ones. We always preferred to keep our children in public schools and were fortunate enough to live in neighborhoods
where they were good. If there's one conclusion I arrived at after putting my kids through French public schools, it's that no perfect system exists.

I found that compared to U.S. high schools, standards in French lycées are pretty high. When my son David was in the ninth grade, his summer reading list of books included works by Alexandre Dumas, Anatole France, George Orwell, and Ray Bradbury, as well as a modern French version of
Tristan and Isolde
by French medievalist René Louis. In eleventh grade, my son Benjamin (who progressed from weird black drawings to being a mathematics buff) read books by Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Edgar Poe, and Émile Zola, among others. For me, the way French education sticks to the classics is an advantage (excuse me, all you PC types out there).