It was September 4, the day after la rentrée scolaire, back-to-school in France. Our daughters weren’t in school yet. The four of us were rubbing our eyes after the night flight from Montreal to Paris. When we arrived at the customs gate at Charles de Gaulle Airport, we handed our passports to a placid-looking customs agent. Because of residency requirements, we watched carefully to make sure he actually stamped all passports with the date of our entry, something customs agents used to be rather casual about. He glanced at the first two, then handed them back to us, properly stamped, without a word.
Then something in the machine jammed. The customs agent sat up straight, suddenly looking punctilious. He carefully matched our daughters’ (almost identical) faces to their passport photos. Instead of handing the photos back to us like he did before, he held them up in front of us and shook them in our faces. “Your children aren’t in school!”
And so they weren’t. We hesitated. One should never give customs agents more information than they ask for, and we didn’t have the best excuse for missing school anyway. We had arrived in France a day late because it was 25 percent cheaper: airfare to Paris dropped by a quarter after la rentrée. Jean-Benoît tried to reassure the agent. “Ne vous inquiétez pas [don’t worry], monsieur, our daughters will go to school as soon as we get them registered at city hall.”
Jean-Benoît probably should have stuck to the Golden Rule of customs communications and kept his mouth shut. “Ça ne se fait pas!” (That’s unthinkable!) the officer shot back. “School started yesterday!” He swung around to his neighboring agent and spread his arms wide so we could see that everyone in the country agreed with him.
We had been expecting a bit of heat from school authorities when we showed up late for school. But we really thought border authorities had bigger issues to tackle. Still, we shouldn’t have been surprised. The French don’t value education. They exalt it.
France is a country that has turned films about school life into a cinematic subgenre of its own. In 2004, one French citizen out of ten went to theaters to see a film about a school choir, Les choristes (The chorus). Two years earlier, one million viewers saw the documentary Être et avoir (To be and to have), about a one-room rural school in Auvergne. During the year we spent in France, there were two more documentary film hits about school life: La cour de Babel (School of Babel), about a class for immigrants in a Paris school, and Sur le chemin de l’école (On the way to school), which follows children in Kenya, Tunisia, Sri Lanka, and Argentina who have to climb mountains and walk through deserts every day to get to school.
After registering our daughters at city hall, we returned to our apartment, across the street from their new school, and walked fifty feet with them on their own chemin de l’école. It was day four of classes, and the sidewalk in front of the school was packed with parents, grandparents, and nannies trying to figure out what was going on. France had changed its school schedule the year we arrived, adding a half day of school on Wednesday mornings and shortening the school day on Tuesdays and Fridays. Parents were confused and frustrated, and our principal (the first one; he would go on sick leave the next week) looked as if he were trying to manage some kind of humanitarian crisis. Canada’s and France’s school years don’t quite coincide so we had to talk to him to figure out which grade to put the girls in. We said bonjour and began to explain our situation.
The principal cut us off when he heard our daughters speaking English to Julie.
Mais ces enfants parlent français? (These children speak French?) It was more of a cry of distress than a question. Bigotry was not the issue here: his concern was administrative. We had registered our daughters in the regular class. Immigrant students who do not speak French are normally put in special integration classes in another school. Jean-Benoît assured the principal that our daughters spoke French to him.
But when we went to pick the girls up at the end of their first day of school, the hammer fell on their language skills, once again. We were again waiting in the throng of parents on the sidewalk when a tall man in his late fifties waved to us from the back of the crowd. He was dressed in a blue overshirt, and at first we thought he was a janitor. It took us a moment to remember that the smock was the traditional schoolteacher’s blouse. He was Nathalie’s new teacher, Monsieur Laouni. “I’m delighted to have Nathalie in my class,” he said with a sparkle in his eye. “There’s just one problem. Nathalie needs to speak more.” We were dumbfounded. Surely a teacher would understand that a ten-year-old newcomer might not steal the floor on her first day in a new school, in a new country. Monsieur Laouni did understand. But it didn’t matter. “Nathalie needs to make herself heard. She needs to take her place in the classroom,” he explained.
That’s when we understood what we had done. By bringing our daughters to France, we were actually sending them to a boot camp where children learn not just to speak, but to speak a lot, and well.
Although the military image might sound far-fetched, it’s not. Public education in France is one enormous centralized machine, with 64,000 schools, a veritable army of 840,000 teachers, and 12 million kids. For the French, the national education system, the Éducation nationale, is a campaign. It has a one-size-fits-all approach: the curriculum is identical from the British Channel to the Mediterranean (including overseas territories).
Making sure citizens master French is the number one objective of French education, and strong oral skills are a big part of the project. “Speaking well is primordial,” paramount, Monsieur Laouni announced to parents at the first parent-teacher meeting two weeks later, as if everyone didn’t know that already. Our daughters’ teachers were a master study in contrasts. Erika’s teacher Madame Letendre was soft-spoken and methodical, her hair in a neat bob and her classroom suitably tidy and organized. Next door, Monsieur Laouni’s classroom had no particular order we could discern. Desks and odd tables were scattered about the room and cluttered with gadgets we couldn’t identify.
Yet despite their differences, both teachers agreed wholeheartedly about what was essential: les exposés, oral presentations. No other subject—except maybe English instruction—was as thoroughly explained, or aroused more interest among parents. Even before either teacher had a chance to elaborate, parents started blitzing them with questions about the exposés. How long would the exposés be? How often would students give them? Would they choose their own topics or have them assigned?
That’s when we really understood Monsieur Laouni’s day-one assessment of Nathalie, and why he felt the need to alert us about what he perceived as her oral deficiencies. The French don’t think of oral presentations as something some kids naturally do better than others. To the French, speaking in public is a fundamental part of education, a life skill. All kids have to do it, and do it well.
As far as we could tell, most French kids do end up speaking amazingly well, with confidence and precision. We heard this for ourselves at the end of the school year, when classes put on plays for the parents in the school gym. One grade 6 group performed the Greek tragedy Antigone, written by Sophocles around 441 BC. None of the children sounded the slightest bit self-conscious as they bellowed out their lines. And they all knew their lines.
Our daughters were never what you’d call big talkers, except between themselves. Yet after only two months of school in France, friends who had known them in Quebec already heard the difference. “They are more precise,” commented Mireille, a French friend who partially raised her children in Quebec. “They’re asking questions all the time,” another Quebec friend remarked when she visited us later in the year.
Like little French children, our girls developed an impressive stock of rhetorical tools. They beefed up their elocution by marking their intentions with qualifying phrases like “en fait…” (as a matter of fact) or “pour l’instant…” (for the moment). Phrases like this flow off the tongues of French children effortlessly, making them sound like little adults. (The influence only went so far in our case. We never heard our own children start a sentence with “globalement…” [as a general matter of speaking], as one of their friends did on a regular basis.)
Had they been exposed to it longer by staying in France an extra year, the normalizing effect of French school would probably have erased our daughters’ Quebec accents altogether and would have vastly expanded their vocabulary. Even by the middle of the year, we noticed that when the girls arrived home at the end of the school week, after five days of instruction, their pronunciation had shifted and their vowels flattened out to a hybrid Parisian-Quebecois accent. After spending the weekend with us, the girls’ accents shifted back to the original Quebecois.
So how do teachers do it? For starters, language is the highest priority on the school curriculum. As our daughter Erika put it one night several months after school started, “They don’t teach French here. They teach grammar.” We saw what Erika meant when she brought her first report card home in December. Elementary school report cards in France are not a sheet of paper. They are a ten-page booklet, with a clear plastic cover, which students keep throughout their elementary studies. There’s nothing fancy about the marking system: kids get A (for “acquired”), B (for “needs reinforcement”), C (for “in the process of being acquired”), or D (for “not acquired”). But that’s where the minimalism ends. The number of “acquisitions” the French evaluate in a single report card is mind-boggling. Kids get 191 different marks (though not all topics are evaluated every year). Nowhere is this level of analysis higher than in French (and they do call it French, contrary to Erika’s impression), which is divided into eight subsections—oral skills, reading, calligraphy, literature, composition, vocabulary, grammar, and spelling—and sixty-eight subsections for those categories.
Grammar—the king topic—has no fewer than twenty-two subsections in which teachers evaluate ultraspecialized skills like “using adjectives correctly in possessive phrases” (manipuler l’adjectif et le complement du nom) or “recognizing an adverbial phrase” (reconnaître les complements circonstanciels). Only math is evaluated with something close to the same rigor as French.
Six weeks after school started we met our daughters’ teachers to discuss their progress. Classes in public schools in France are large, with thirty or more students, so we weren’t expecting much feedback. We just wanted to make sure the girls were fitting in and keeping up. To our surprise, Madame Letendre and Monsieur Laouni each sized up our girls’ strengths and weaknesses pretty thoroughly. Both had the same concern. Madame Letendre tried to be diplomatic. “Children Erika’s age,” she explained gingerly, “are expected to be in the process of mastering the science of their language.” In less diplomatic language: Erika needed to get with the programme.
We have never heard anyone in France say learning should be fun, or that kids should do “what interests them.” French parents have none of the soul-searching North American parents (and educators) have about what kids should learn (facts or analytical skills?) or how they should learn (by rote, or self-directed learning?). French parents don’t mix purposes. School is work. And kids are there to follow Le Programme.
In Le Programme, French children are taught to assimilate material. That means there is a lot of memorizing. Every week, Erika arrived home with at least one assignment that required strict memorization. This applied across the board, to every subject. Madame Letendre had her pupils memorize short descriptions of the political organization of medieval cities and the Five Pillars of Islam. Erika memorized a summary of how the Frankish warrior Charles Martel defeated an invading Islamic army in France in 732. She learned by heart lists of early French kings and their contributions, and memorized the number of towns, departments, and regions in France.1
Erika learned “the science of the language”—grammar—exactly the same way. She mastered the definitions of different types of adjectives, learned categories of adverbs by heart, and memorized examples of their use. On written tests, she had to regurgitate these formal definitions verbatim, including the examples.
Both our daughters also memorized poems, which they had to recite by heart in front of the class. Like all French kids, they learned the classics. They brought home verse written by the seventeenth-century poet Jean de la Fontaine and by the twentieth-century writer Marcel Pagnol. By the end of the year, they could memorize up to forty lines of poetry, which they afterward recited to their classmates. (Le Programme evidently hasn’t changed much over the years. When we mentioned poems our kids were learning, some French friends recited them spontaneously, on the spot. They had learned the same ones when they were in primary school, decades ago.)
Nathalie was assigned one memorably difficult poem, “Heureux qui comme Ulysse” (Happy the man), a famous sonnet in a collection written by the sixteenth-century poet Joachim du Bellay, a member of the Pleiades group of poets. The theme struck us as slightly esoteric for ten-year-olds: the sonnet is about Du Bellay’s longing for his home village in the Loire after a four-and-a-half-year sojourn in Italy. But the most amazing thing was, Nathalie had to learn it in its original form, in sixteenth-century French—the poem was written before the French Academy standardized French spellings. Fortunately, Jean-Benoît found a version of the poem sung by Algerian-born French pop singer Ridan on YouTube. And Nathalie did find it easier to master with a beat.
Our girls had some catching up to do as far as French history and references went, but they never complained about the full-time memorization regimen, even though it was antipodal to the methods used at their school in Montreal, where teachers ask them to “react” to stories. Memorizing is boring but it gives kids instant gratification and a piece of knowledge they can use to show off when the need or opportunity arises. Though it might not be every child’s cup of tea, one North American friend whose daughter spent a year in Paris reported exactly the same thing: her daughter didn’t mind just meeting clearly set expectations for a change.
We did occasionally meet French parents who bemoaned this regime of constant memorization. “It’s futile. You forget it afterward,” one mother told us. But few French parents ever said what North Americans might: that rote learning was stifling their children’s creativity or stunting their analytical skills. It didn’t seem to be doing any damage to French kids. Julie accompanied Erika’s class one afternoon on an outing to a small exhibit about Grimms’ fairy tales at a German cultural center near the Luxembourg Gardens. The exercise was a three-stage affair in which kids listened to the contes, tales, and answered questions. Erika’s teacher then read a conte to her students and asked them to compare the stories to the versions of the same tales written by the seventeenth-century French writer Charles Perrault, the author of the Mother Goose Tales. The first child to answer said he wondered how some of the stories could be so similar, when they were written in two different countries, and so long ago. Madame Letendre had asked her students to engage in an international, historical exercise in comparative literature and the nine-year-olds in Erika’s class didn’t flinch.
The upshot of all the memorization is that French kids learn to speak the way they write, or at least as other people write. The French are known, in linguistic circles, for aspiring to speak with the same formality and precision as they use in their written language—as opposed to English speakers, who embrace different standards for written and oral expression. It’s one reason the French use more words to express the same ideas. The French language does not lack the capacity for concision. The French just love words.
We often saw how the spoken and the written converge in French education, as when Nathalie mysteriously mastered the passé simple (the simple past). The simple past is a verb tense usually described as “literary.” Since the nineteenth century, it has fallen out of usage in spoken French because it’s hard to learn: there’s no formula for the simple past that applies to verbs across the board, as there is for the more popular passé composé (past perfect), which has universally replaced the simple past in speech. This is why, today, the simple past is almost never used in day-to-day language, and rarely in speech at all except in formal address and in literature.
Erika learned the passé simple by memorizing verb endings and reproducing them, verbatim, on tests. But Nathalie’s teacher, Monsieur Laouni, was less systematic about getting kids to memorize (an attitude that enraged one group of parents so much they dedicated the year to getting him kicked out of the school). Monsieur Laouni taught the simple past the way he did everything else, with no particular method we could discern. We never actually saw Nathalie study it.
So we were astonished when she arrived home one evening in March, after six months of school in French, with a short story she had composed in the simple past. Nathalie appeared to have mastered this rather obscure and seldom-used verb tense just by “picking it up.” It took us a few days to understand what had transpired. Although she hadn’t been memorizing it, like her sister had, Nathalie had been using the simple past, and listening to it, for months. Many of the written stories Nathalie read and the poems she memorized were written in the simple past so she learned an unspoken verb tense, at least partly, by ear.
Spoken and written French also converge in the famous French dictée. Dictation exercises are a unique French education ritual. They are not like English spelling dictations. In French dictées, teachers read a short text with sentences and paragraphs, so students have to produce the correct verb conjugations and grammar as well as word spellings.
The dictée was invented in the 1840s when teachers were looking for a new method to teach French. Until that point, teachers in France used the so-called cacophonic method: students were exposed to a list of possible spellings and had to identify the right one, like multiple choice. The method created more confusion than anything and was abandoned in favor of the dictée, which tests students not merely on spelling but also on grammar. Like English, French spelling is complicated, but the real difference is that French grammar is often inaudible—most plurals, for instance, cannot be heard, and many nuances of verb tenses are not apparent in oral speech, only in writing. So la dictée is a useful tool for teaching and testing and went on to become something of a national obsession.
A few weeks after school started, Erika came home with a question. She had already picked up the French rhetorical tick of announcing that she had a question before asking it. “J’ai une question. Why doesn’t our school have a name?” For a North American, raised with the ethic of school spirit, Erika was disappointed with the clinical label above the front door of our school: “City of Paris. Mixed Elementary School.”
The answer to her question goes to the heart of why the French put so much emphasis on speaking and writing correctly, and why they remain so formal, almost old-fashioned, in the way they teach. French public schools are not viewed as integral parts of communities, as they are in North America, and rarely exhibit their unique identity—though some elementary schools do have names. That’s because there is only “one” French education system, called L’Éducation nationale (National Education). It’s not even accurate to speak of a French school “system.” School is an institution in France. Schools in France are factory outlets of one big company called the French state.2
When national education was created in France in the nineteenth century, the objective of schools was not just to educate the population, but to assimilate diverse groups by teaching them a common language, French. The French are generally well versed in their own history, but even some of them forget how recently the French language became a common tongue in their country. At the time of the French Revolution, not even half of the population understood French. Only a quarter could speak it fluently. The rest spoke one of myriad local languages, dialects, and patois, two dozen of which are still spoken in continental France—the largest ones are Breton, Alsatian, Occitan (and its most famous dialect, Provençal), Picard, and Basque. By World War I, most French could speak French, but half still spoke one of what are today qualified as “regional languages.”
French had been declared the official language of the kingdom centuries earlier, in 1539, by a king’s ordinance. Oddly, the French language made little progress for the next 250 years. During the French Revolution, the government realized that it had to find a way to get its citizens to speak French. But in the upheaval of the Revolution and imperial wars that followed, organizing a gigantic school system proved too daunting a task. It was impossible to train the tens of thousands of teachers that were necessary to teach millions of children. It took France forty more years to get over this hurdle.
The “project” of getting the French to speak French would influence how the language was taught, and how the French came to think about teaching French to this day. In the 1830s France got its first education minister, François Guizot, who started building a national education system. From the start, French teaching was, literally, second-language teaching. Many language students today would recognize the methods: students learned grammar and vocabulary by heart. This tendency toward rules-based learning was reinforced by the intellectual climate of nineteenth-century France, when French intellectuals became infatuated with the ideals of classicism and language purism—two ideas from the seventeenth century that had made a comeback. Purism entered schools and stayed there. As the French writer André Gide (1869–1951) wrote, “En chaque Français, il y a un Vaugelas qui sommeille” (Every Frenchman has a Vaugelas inside him), which referred to a famous seventeenth-century grammarian who was one of the original members of the French Academy.
That spirit lives on, to put it mildly. Today, less than 9 percent of the French, or 5 million, speak one of the regional languages, and less than 1 percent speak a regional language exclusively before attending school. Yet French education never completely shed its original raison d’être. Today’s language teaching techniques have retained much of the philosophy of the original methods. Rules-based, prescriptive teaching is still the norm.
Even if you don’t have children, education is a great topic of conversation in France. In fact, it’s hard to avoid. While with some things, like dictées, the emphasis on oral expression and rote learning never seem to change, teaching methods and the education program itself have evolved over the last century and are perpetual subjects of debate today. But of course, in a society whose school system is designed to teach children how to be convincing, it should come as no surprise that when the French grow up, they like to argue about school.