French Toast

by Harriet Welty Rochefort

  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 ex
ists.

  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).

  Sometimes there is a lack of communication between a teacher and the parents. But generally you can get everything worked out via a little notebook the children are given at the beginning of the year. In it, the teacher can write things such as “David was very noisy in class today. This must cease.” In this way, parents are aware of what is going on in the class. This is handy, because French schools are definitely not open houses. The teachers’ job is to teach, the administrators’ to administrate, and the parents’ to keep their distance unless specifically invited to the school.

  Sometimes we American mothers don’t understand certain punishments that seem to be par for the course. My friend Jan was furious because her daughter, age nine, had been made to stand up for forty-five minutes in the corridor as a punishment. I related the story to my son David, then age fourteen. “So what’s the problem?” he asked philosophically. “That used to happen to me all the time.” That was the first wind I had ever had of that!

  It’s true that, by American standards, French teachers can be hard on students. They don’t mince their words. They’re not afraid of the school board! A teacher in a French school will not hesitate to tell a kid that he is a lousy, terrible student with no future, and what is he doing in her class, anyway? My niece, while taking her oral exams at the Sorbonne, was told by a professor that she hoped that her other grades were good, because, she said, “with the grade I’m giving you, you’ll need all the help that you can get.”

  In a French school, work has to be really special to get an A. French teachers mark from zero to twenty, with twenty being an almost inaccessibly high mark. When last in Iowa, a math teacher in my former high school told me that if he dared give a C- or, heaven help him, anything lower, the parents would bring the matter up with the school board, and he would get fired. An elementary school teacher in Arizona told me she quit her job because she had been giving C’s to the children in her class who weren’t doing well, and since many of them were Hispanic, she was accused of discrimination.

  In France, this political correctness—or fear for your job if you don’t hand out good grades—is nonexistent. In fact, at two different schools where I taught, I was asked to redo my grades and downgrade them. The director called me in and apologized: “I know that in America you tend to give high grades, but, you see, here the curve is much lower.” I didn’t protest. It’s their system. A colleague told me that the director of a very prestigious school he taught in personally administered a dressing-down to the faculty for the high marks they were giving their remarkably gifted students. “We can’t have any more of this,” he yelled. A faculty member responded ironically, “Why don’t we just give them all C’s and D’s in that case?” But that’s the system. One must aim for perfection.

  Yet there are few complaints. French students are used to seeing an A or A+ as an almost unattainable goal, and when they do finally get a high mark, they know it means something.

  Of course you need high standards in a country where only a chosen few will make it to the very top—the grandes écoles. Many French parents, like many American parents, have big ambitions for their kids from the time they set foot in kindergarten. (I realize this is true on the East Coast of the United States; we were spared this pressure in Iowa.) I’ll never forget Claudie, my son’s kindergarten teacher, telling me, “You’re so different from the other parents.” I asked, “Why?” She said, “Because you just want your son to have a good time and you aren’t pushing him.” I replied, “Why would I push the kid? He’s only five, after all.” And she responded, “Oh, there are parents who want Pierre to go to Polytechnique and are already putting on the pressure.”

  “What’s Polytechnique?” I asked. I don’t remember her answer, but I do remember that it took me years to understand the French system of grandes écoles, of which Polytechnique is one of the most, if not the most, prestigious. Now that my twenty-year-old is in one of these schools, I at long last understand the grandes écoles system but find myself in serious trouble when trying to explain it to my American family. It’s so typically French!

  In a nutshell, the grandes écoles were created by Napoléon to form a corps of elites. These schools are different from the university because any student with his baccalaureate degree from high school can go to the university. This means that universities are overcrowded and that many students give up and drop out. In contrast, students entering the grandes écoles have gone through a rigorous selection process, notably two years of preparatory school after the baccalaureate. During these two years, they prepare to take the stiff qualifying exams that will determine if they get in a grande école and which school they qualify for. Classes in the grandes écoles are smaller, and once you get in, it is highly unusual to flunk out.

  One day, after my sister had insisted on Benjamin’s coming to the United States for a year, I could see that she didn’t understand that he couldn’t, because if you are on this track in France, you can’t get off it, and so I tried to explain all of this to my family.

  “Yes, you see, Benjamin graduated from high school but there was no graduation ceremony, no gowns, no music, no prom, no diploma handed out. His high school diploma, in fact, was mailed to him several months later. And since his grades in math during school and on the baccalaureate exam [and then I had to explain that this is a national exam that all French kids take prior to leaving high school] were excellent, he qualified for a prep school, so in two years he can take exams to try to get into what the French call a grande école.”

  At about this point, my family members started getting mystified. If he’s so good, why didn’t he just go on to the university? No, I explained, in France, it’s the reverse of what happens in the United States: If you’re really good, you don’t go to the university. You go to a special prep school where there’s a steady diet of math and science for the kids who are excellent in scientific studies, or literature for kids who excel in the arts, and after a two-year grind, the ones who are left take competitive exams to enter the grandes écoles.

  This explanation sparked a flicker of interest from my mom, who, as a former teacher, is very interested in education in general and my sons’ education in particular.

  “And where is this preparatory school he is attending?”

  “It’s in a high school, Mom,” I said, and I suddenly realized this whole thing appeared too strange to be real. My son had graduated from high school and was now studying in a high school. . . . I could see by the look on her face that she was confused.

  “In a high school?” she said.

  “Yes, it’s in a high school.” I beamed. “But of course these are no longer high school students, so they have entirely separate classes. They are in classes from about nine A.M. to six P.M. five days a week and on Saturday morning, and they have a minimum of three hours of homework after school. Twice a week, they have what the French call ‘colles’ [oral exams]. They are given a really difficult topic and have to discourse on it for an hour. When they’re not in school, they are at home doing their homework. They have no time for outside activities.”

  I took a deep breath. “But, at the end of the two years, after they have suffered through this grind and are but pale fragile remnants of what they once were, they have been thoroughly trained to take these stiff exams. Depending on the score they get, they will be admitted to the best schools in the nation. For those who w
ant to be teachers or researchers, this school would be the École Normale Supérieure followed by Polytechnique for engineering. And once they get into these schools, they can relax and cool it and kind of do what they want.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know Benjamin wanted to be an engineer!”

  “He doesn’t, Mom. But in France, if you’re smart and good in math, and even if you don’t want to be an engineer, you have to follow this track, because if not, you would go off to the university with everyone else, and classes at the university are overflowing. No one pays any attention to you there, and when you get out, your diploma is worth almost nothing.”

  “My goodness! But what does Benjamin want to do?”

  “He doesn’t really know. He thinks he wants to be a teacher. But all this is immaterial at this point. What he has to do is go through the preparatory classes, pass his exams, and make it into a grande école. Then he will be able to choose.”

  “He will make it of course, but, well, what if he didn’t?”

  “Then he would have to go to the university with everyone else.”

  My mother by now was totally lost, and I realized that she must have thought that her grandson had probably flunked out of high school and was doing some kind of remedial course somewhere.

  Of course, it’s just the opposite. Having taught in the grandes écoles, I can affirm that the kids who are there are the crème de la crème in terms of standing up under pressure, working like dogs, and assimilating an enormous amount of information.

  Los Angeles Times correspondent Stanley Meisler, who lived in France for five years, puts it better than I do: “The best graduates of the French educational system have a precision of mind, command of language and store of memory that would make the heart of most American educators ache with envy. It is doubtful that any school system in the world teaches more logic and grammar or offers more courses.”