Education in France

I was talking with my friend Yolaine some time ago and she explained culture-shock theory (or at least the pseudo-science pop version) to me. It turns out that the various stages of culture shock are fairly well documented and that my experiences living abroad, both in France and in Lebanon, were fairly universal ones. Culture shock has four stages. First, you love the place, or more accurately, you only see what is wonderful about a place. For France it's the architecture, the fashion and the trains; for Lebanon, the food, the beaches and the nightlife. Second, you hate the place, you only see the bad, in France, the bureaucracy and unpragmatism, in Lebanon, the fatalism and the litter. The third stage is the amused observer stage, the Mark Twain stage. You see the madness of the foreign culture but it is no longer distressing, you come to accept it as one of the inevitable absurdities of life. By the end of my time in France I was able suffer no emotion more violent than vague amusement that I apparently needed my passport to withdraw my last 11 Euros from my bank account, even though they had a scan of my passport in their system. Finally, a country feels like home. The good is taken for granted and the bad as inevitable, you become nearly as blind to the good and bad of the foreign culture as in your own.

I went through a similar process in my relationship with the French education system. Actually, I skipped phase 1, I never thought French education was amazing. My first reaction was that the system was absurd. The French approach to education is somewhat akin to the men's dress code at a formal ball: tuxedos only. A three hour lecture is just that, three hours of lecturing. No questions, no discussion, no exchange of ideas. The professor has the knowledge, it is their profession to impart it, if they are graceful, they might even deign to acknowledge there are students listening to them. French Professors don't have office hours. Except for administrative tasks, they don't have offices either. The assumption is that students do not have the base or the tools to think, only professors, or possibly doctoral candidates, do. It is essentially an elementary school approach to university. Just as Canadian third graders aren't asked for their opinions on 6 X 8 - they must simply learn that the answer is 48 - French university students are not asked for their opinions on politics, or philosophy. 

I initially concluded that the end of France was imminent. But as I entered stage three of my education culture shock it occurred to me that the proper time to allow for critical thought in education is fairly arbitrary. I suspect that in Canada we begin to put critical thought in the curriculum in high school because teenagers are naturally suspicious of authority anyways. But the French teenager has had a long and rigorous acclimatization to absolute power being wielded with total arbitrariness. In a country where the gardens are drawn like industrial blueprints a joyous anarchy of opinions would be a bit much. 

So it's not that critical thought is not valued. It is just that the French consider that a much larger base of knowledge is required before anyone should be allowed to think, or at least think in public. In order to be a contributing member of French intellectual life it is necessary to know the history of the republic; to understand the insights of Rousseau, Marx, and Sartre; to see why Yves St. Laurent and Picasso's innovations were important; and on and on and on. In North-America undergrad is where you have youth's last fling and learn to be an independent individual who can be 'a productive member of society'. The French equivalent, "la Fac", is elementary philosophy school. The paradigmatic American is the self-made businessman. France personified is an intellectual, and there is no such thing as a self-made intellectual in France. 

French students are excellent in two areas. They have an enormous amount of knowledge, and they are superb writers. Both of these are the result of an education system that stresses repetition and high formal achievement. It is also these characteristics that make the French system so difficult to outsiders, whether immigrants or exchange students (who all pass, but only because they are exchange students). A newcomer to the system has neither the database of facts nor the refined formal writing of his classmates. Like so much in France, education is a walled garden; excellent for those on the inside, nearly impossible for the rest.    

Urbanism

Just minutes from the heart of Old Quebec, where the historic lower town slips into a modern quarter with high tech companies, art galleries, and a restaurant that serves as Quebec City’s China Town; a concrete highway runs over the city like a coffin lid. Supported by massive concrete pillars, this highway cuts the two parts of the city off from each other in a classic example of awful automobile-centric urban planning. Anyone who thinks Vancouver needs a highway through the city should take note. Fortunately, art came to the rescue. Working with local street kids, a number of Quebec City artists covered the pillars with gorgeous, colourful, murals. In the old city itself, la fresque de Québécois, a mural depicting famous Quebecers throughout history has turned an eyesore into a tourist attraction. This strategy of urban recovery through murals was inspired by similar projects in Lyon - the fresque des Québécois was modeled on the fresque des Lyonnais Célèbres, and completed with the help of a group of artists from Lyon – and the city has about a dozen murals. As in Quebec, the murals were used to liven up ugly walls and grey neighbourhoods.

This is the fresque des Lyonnais Célèbres – the mural of famous Lyonnais – which includes some Roman emperor, and the Lumiere brothers, who built the first cinema projector. This mural wraps around the corner of the building as well; I particularly like the café that’s been painted on the ground floor. This mural is right in the heart of the city, just off the Saône river, and there is a similar one just down the street where all the people have been replaced by books.

This mural, one of my favorites, is a lovely testament to France’s love affair with literature. Where an American or Canadian politician might prepare for politics by burnishing his credentials as a businessman or as a lawyer, a prospective French politician writes books. (Which, in a society where politics is more about ideas than results, makes perfect sense.) Anyways, both in Paris and in Lyon the banks of the rivers are garnished with outdoor booksellers on sunny Saturday afternoons, and here in Lyon, where a windowless grey wall once stood, a wall of painted books now hovers benevolently over the booksellers.

But the most interesting murals are in a section of the city called the Quartier États-Unis, needless to say this neighbourhood was not named recently. It was in fact planned, built, and named, at the beginning of the twentieth century. An urbanist named Tony Garnier thought that the old city of Lyon was dirty, dark, and infested with pollution and people. So he planned a huge neighbourhood that was supposed to be a model of livable urban space for the future. Since then a number of murals have been painted in the neighbourhood including this one that depicts the way Garnier perceived Lyon.

This is another favorite of mine, I love the dual concept, the way that there is a painting of a riotous, industrial, smog filled, city on the upper part of the wall, and then a little wink-wink allusion that this is in fact a wall through the traditional style posters painted on the bottom half of the mural (reproductions of which litter the more touristy areas of Paris, particularly Montmartre). As you might have guessed from the name of the neighbourhood, Garnier had a somewhat utopist sensibility (although the term utopia loses some of its bite in such a determinedly unpragmatic society, if all policy comes from theory you may as well have a hopeful theory). His original plan envisioned a massive neighbourhood of residential buildings, schools and community centers, and industry. Many of the murals in the neighbourhood are actually just paintings of his architectural drawings:

If you look carefully at the top photo you can see that it is an
industrial plant, complete with smoke stacks and tubing. Such worshipful industrialism has tended to be the exclusive province of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world and angry Russian émigrés, I doubt that Ayn Rand sells much in France, but I imagine that at the turn of the century industry was still seen as an opportunity for huge progress, both technologically and socially. The high level of planning is however completely within character. I’ve been reading Paris to the Moon lately, a book in which Adam Gopnik, a writer for the New Yorker tries to dissect the joys, frustrations, commonalities, and essential differences between the U.S. and France (although New York and Paris are not exactly typical of their countries). At one point in discussing the theoretical approach he says, quite accurately I think, that it’s not quite that they can’t see the individual trees because they are only looking at the forest, but rather that they can’t see the forest because it’s covered by the map. Well in Lyon they’ve actually managed to create a physical manifestation of theory worship by covering a neighbourhood in murals of architectural plans. The irony is that if the plan had been successful, if the neighbourhood had flourished, they wouldn’t have needed to revitalize it with murals.

If this neighbourhood had been in North America the revitalization plan would have involved opening more stores, installing brighter lights, organizing an ethnic street festival and hoping that a Starbucks might set up and then the whole place could gentrify. The French approach was to invite various artists from around the world to create a mural of their vision of the ideal city. The mural on the left represents the ideal Egyptian city, and is a combination of pharaonic symbolism and silver lines meant to evoke microchips. The mural to the right is a vision of the ideal Indian city, and although it is supposed to represent three essences of life (something like culture, tradition, and religion) the little stick figures look for all the world to me like archaic video game characters that I need to jump over or shoot with my laser gun. The final fresque represents the ideal Russian city. The colourful chaos of this mural was a deliberate reaction by the artist against soviet style planned building, which was uniform, concrete, and grey. The mural actually reminds me of parts of Lyon: jumbles of pastel coloured houses piled up around each other like the end of a game Jenga, and the blue river snaking through the city, small enough to be part of daily life. But it is emphatically not like the Quartier États-Unis. Unlike the neighbourhood, the murals succeed because they are unique, colourful, and joyful.













Just outside of this area, off of a major road, three murals look down on a 5 way intersection cluttered with cars, construction materials, a tramway line, and telephone wire; they form an entry gate of sorts to the Quartier États-Unis. The murals are spectacular and odd: a futuristic glass and metal triangular apartment building, a reproduction of a 16th century Dutch masterpiece, and what seems to be a joyful cartoon version of the Dutch masterpiece. The masterpiece’s subject, the tower of Babel, seems dissonant with the celebration of Garnier the urbanist’s utopian vision. Is the mural an intended dig at the neighbourhood, a stridently humanist celebration of man’s potential? I have no idea. Regardless, this cautionary tale about ideal cities and man’s efforts at grand projects is a perfect front door decoration to the ‘United States Quarter’.

Why Ideology is Sometimes Better than Pragmatism

There are so many things I find maddening about France: the bureaucracy, the seemingly arbitrary paternalism, the total lack of pragmatism; but there are also many things I admire about France: the high level of discourse, about both politics and culture, the architecture, the fashion (or more precisely, the way that everyone is aware of their physical presentation), and the sustained excellence of their baked goods. For a couple of months now I've been trying wrap my mind around what it is about the French mindset that is so different; this mindset that leads to such wonderful culture but also to the French's frustrating detachment from reality. I'd been groping around for words to fit my intuitions until I stumbled on an interview with Adam Gopnik this week. Gopnik is a writer for the New Yorker who lived in Paris for five years writing the Paris Diaries for the New Yorker. He subsequently published many of them as well as some other writing in his book Paris to the Moon. As Gopnik puts it, the biggest difference between America (but it could just as easily be Canada, or Quebec, or England) and France is “the weight you give empirical evidence in everyday argument and conversation.” In France empirical evidence is not that important, what is important is the argument, what is important is the rational, structured, road, from first principles, to the application. The clearest example of this for me is in politics. In Canadian and American politics everyone is an empiricist. Every politician claims that on the basis of empirical facts their program will bring about the best result for the country. Even President Bush, who we tend to think of as driven by unthinking ideology is essentially a pragmatist. Bush went to war in Iraq because he thought it would achieve his goal, because based on his understanding of the Middle-East, he believed that invading Iraq really could bring democracy to the region (or really would make him rich, or get oil for the U.S., or whatever). The reason Iraq is such a disaster is not because Bush had an incorrect theory or ideology, but because he was colossally ignorant about politics in Iraq and the Middle-East. Bush isn't an ideologue, he's just an incredibly ignorant pragmatist. Empiricism is so ingrained in us that a politician who proposed policies based on ideology – say that we should not have a Queen because that is a contradiction with the essential nature of a modern (in the sense of modernity) nation state – would seem completely absurd.

But that is exactly how politics is approached in France. Let me illustrate. 1968 was a tumultuous year both in the U.S. and in France. In the U.S. the anti-Vietnam war protests were gaining critical mass and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. radicalized some of the civil rights movement; in France students and workers rebelled against the old institutions, there were riots in Paris, Universities were occupied and the country is still ruled by the bequests of that movement. Recent coverage of 1968 in the U.S. tends to focus on MLK Jr., on the successes of the civil right movement, or on what remains to be done. Le Monde's coverage of Mai 1968 in France begins with an interview with a philosopher described as a theorist of the altermondialiste (which is like being anti-globalization, except not defining yourself by opposition, but by a third way) movement. I've been trying to understand what happened in 1968 but I am finding it very difficult because no one is writing about what happened, or what the actual consequences were for France. The thing is, those just don't matter in France, the way in which it shaped thoughts and ideas is far more important because those are the things that govern politics.

Today, as I was studying in the library with the desk lamp turned on, a library staff member came over and asked me to turn it off if I wasn't using it, for the sake of the environment. The library was fairly well lit and in truth I wasn't really using it, but one fluorescent desk lamp being lit for one extra hour is hardly going to melt the polar ice cap. So why did the library staff member feel the need to come over and tell me to turn it off? And why did he not feel it was necessary to shush the two students next to me who were talking? I think it all comes down to this ideological mindset; the environment is good, electricity is bad for the environment, ergo as a quasi-moral principle I should turn off the light. (It also has to do with another insight of Gopnik's, that the French grow up with and so are used to “the unappeasable power of arbitrary authority”, but that will have to wait for another day.)

There are a number of consequences to this philosophical approach to everything and not all of them are bad. It's one of the reasons that culture is so revered and, well, cultured. But in the realm of politics and public policy it seems like madness at first glance. How can you ever improve society if you don't bother with empirical results? It seems like a total rejection of the scientific revolution, as absurd as Democritus and Aristotle arguing about the nature of the atom without ever performing an experiment. And, ironically, it is a terrible idea in theory; but it actually works out all right in practice. France has all kinds of problems but a war in Iraq is not one of them. The thing about being ideological is that you can make the right decision even with the wrong facts. On the basis of the evidence that was presented to the world community just before the invasion of Iraq, there was a reasonable case for the war. In Canada there was serious debate about the war, we did not lightly refuse to aid our American allies. But in France the answer was obvious, of course they would not go to war, partly perhaps because of some reflexive anti-Americanness, but also because the facts didn't make much of a difference to the French. War was awful and that was enough for France. In a sense we do the same thing in our judicial system in Canada. We refuse to convict someone of a criminal offense unless they are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. We have made a value judgement that because conviction can have such severe consequences, and because justice is inevitably flawed, we would rather acquit a guilty man than convict an innocent one. Our whole criminal justice system is built on a moral judgement and on a recognition of fallibility. Our public policy debates do not operate that way. When going to war we never said: “yes there is a strong case for war but I still have a reasonable doubt”. We never said “yes there is a reasonable case for war but because of the awfulness of war we need more than a reasonable case.” The French model is much more resistant to reasonable arguments. Go through the archives of The Economist some day and you will realize that some very reasonable argument have been made for some pretty terrible ideas, and have swayed some very influential people. Sometimes, our intuitions get closer to the truth than any rational analysis. Of course, when you are walking through a supermarket with carts strewn all over the store because the aisles are too small to pass other shoppers, a little pragmatism might be helpful.

Worth Reading

I've been working on a couple of longer pieces that should be up soon but one of the big obstacles is that I spend something like 4 hours a day browsing the internet (or angrily cursing France because the internet is down for the sixth time today). (The correct term for what I do really is 'surfing', but the word just comes across as a little mid-nineties archaic, i.e. "surfing the internet is wicked".) However, one happy corollary of my adventures in cyberspace is that I discover a lot of interesting articles, videos, and podcasts. As not everyone has the time I apparently have, I've been toying with how best to share by edited picks, sort of like Digg, except this way you don't have to follow the crowd, just me. For now I've settled on adding a little widget on the left of the blog, I've called it 'worth reading' until I think of something more interesting, but it is a bit of misnomer because there will probably be a lot of podcasts in there. Enjoy.

Raw Energy

I didn't really get into this in my last posting but London is one of the most alive cities I've ever been too. It is similar to New York in its ebullient excitement. Paris on the other hand is beautiful, but stale. Think of the difference between Michael Buble and Amy Winehouse. Anyways, there is a very good article in the Economist this week that compares London and Paris as both cities prepare for mayoral elections.

London

Two weeks after the semester started we had a week off. I can’t even pretend it is a reading week because I’d only had two sessions of each of my classes. Between the frequent vacations, everything being closed for an hour and a half at lunch, and everything being closed on weekends, I haven’t yet figured out when the French work. Maybe this whole work thing is overrated; the French seem to have quite pleasant lives without it. As for me, I spent the week in London.

My first impression of London was that it is very British. Now I realize that demands some explanation, what else would it be, right? Well I think that my impression is a result of some serious anti-stereotyping indoctrinated into me as a 12 year old. In grade school in Canada we learn this lovely fairy tale that stereotypes are wrong (and bad), that all people are more or less the same, and that humanity is a beautiful rainbow. As a result of this education I am always suspicious of stereotypes, I tend to assume that the French don’t really eat camembert all the time (they do), that Germans aren’t actually all that organized (they are), that Italians only eat a little more pasta than we do (they eat pasta all the time), and that the English don’t actually speak with those pretentious accents, ride around in red double decker buses, and have a Queen. On the other hand I have this idea of fictional England: the England of C.S. Lewis, P.G. Wodehouse, Dickens, and Hugh Grant films. Thus arriving in England and realizing that the stereotypes are somewhat true was like looking at the England of my imagination. Behind its modern persona as a modern global cosmopolitan city I had never realized just how much London is still an old imperial capital. The heart of London is a dense network of statues of military men, massive Victorian buildings, and centers of power. Despite Henry VIII’s split from the Catholic Church there is no protestant modesty here; the first words one reads on entering St. Paul’s Cathedral are: “this is the gate of Heaven”. Walking through the core of London feels like being Alice after drinking the shrinking potion.

Finding myself in this nearly imaginary land I took full advantage by playing turista for six days. I saw Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery, Monet’s Water Lilies at the Tate Modern, V-2 rockets at the Imperial War museum, and I had tea and scones at the tower of London. Speaking of which, scones are a totally underrated pastry. Why are there so many croissant shops and so few scone shops in Canada, how did the English colonists not bring their scones recipes to Canada? For the students of the law out there: I also walked by Westminster, the soon to be opened U.K. Supreme Court (I don’t know whether to be happy that there will be no more schizophrenic judgments written in six voices, or sad that Lord Walker of Gestingthorpe is leaving my life), and the Old Bailey. I considered dropping in, then I remembered I was on vacation and had better things to do than watch the misery of others, whether of the parties or of the lawyers I leave to you, my distinguished readers, to decide.

In the end I got to hit for the cycle of English stereotypes. On my flight back to Lyon the twenty rows immediately behind me were full of screaming, rabid, football hooligans. There was a Champions League match between Lyon and Manchester United the next day and the Barmy Army sang rather coarse tunes the whole way to Lyon, out of tune. They didn’t quiet down until an air hostess threatened to have them arrested, and then they just spent the rest of the way loudly arguing whether to listen to her or not. At least I think that’s what they were fighting about; their English was utterly incomprehensible. Fortunately however the English balance their drunken football fanaticism with delicious dry wit. On the way into London the pilot informed us that we would land on time assuming there was no fog, he then added that that was a rather big assumption. But my favorite example came from the society pages of the Independent. In an article describing the disruption in a well-heeled neighbourhood of London caused by Kate Moss moving in, an open minded neighbour noted that crime seemed to be on the decline: “but now we’ve got clusters of paparazzi everywhere… It’s like having a few dozen grown men perform neighbourhood watch – for free.”

clichés

I’m a cigarette away from being a cliché. Every evening I stop by the local épicerie and pick up a baguette and a bottle of wine - total cost: 3.50 euros. In the morning I finish off the baguette with some chocolate spread, which is as French as a striped shirt, but has yet to join the cigarette, the beret, and passionate love-making in the pantheon of truisms. I even read Le Monde, which covers wonderful topics such as the crisis at L’Académie Française, an institution whose members are called immortals, and whose sole role is to decide which words are French, and which are not - think of them as the ultimate arbiters of scrabble. They are currently in a crisis because the average age of the immortals is about 80, and they keep on refusing to elect any new members, apparently those sprightly 70 year olds just haven’t made their mark on the literary world yet.

But my transformation into a stereotype is not entirely complete. Despite the best efforts of whoever built my residence, I continue to shower regularly. The residence building in question is a hideous concrete building with halls painted in fading pink and yellow pastels, adorned by brightly coloured plastic bags hung out of windows by students desperately trying to keep their Camembert fresh – my residence is fridge-less. The toilets have no seats, which leaves me more puzzled than anything else, are you supposed to hover, sit on the cold bowl, or bring your own seat? The showers are operated by a push-button that expires every ten seconds and the kitchen consists of two hotplates and a sink. I suppose the idea is that students will eat most meals at the cafeteria, but then it is closed on weekends and from time to time is closed for as long as a week. Most of the residence buildings are on top of the hill that overlooks Lyon, within an old walled compound of concrete from the 1970s, and stone from the 70s; seriously, one of the res buildings is called the Arches of Agrippa – a Roman general – after the actual ruins which are just outside. My building is outside of the walls. Maybe I should just think of it as an object lesson in the inequalities of the French State, the student version of the banlieues.
There is a cafeteria up the hill from us, the food isn't great - the rule about cafeteria food being awful apparently trumps the rule about French food being good - but it is healthy, and cheap. That and the fact that the entire city is built on a massive hill explains the dearth of corpulent French men and women, the ubiquitous smoking might help as well.

Lyon itself is sort of a cross between Quebec City and Paris. It is built on and around a huge hill, about twice as high as in Quebec City. The heart of the city is the peninsula at the foot of the hill between the Saône and the Rhône. Like Quebec, there is a funiculaire, lots of large painted murals, and steep walks home after closing time. Like Paris the city is criss-crossed by little rivers and bridges, and pretty French girls in designer boots. The university itself is built on the banks of the Rhone; it is a picturesque combination of white stone buildings and grassy courtyards, but it is quite small, and the university library is a bit of a joke, there is less study space than at the UBC law library, and it closes Sundays, and Saturdays after noon. One almost gets the feeling that Lyon 2 is just pretending to be a university, like you could open a door and realize the whole thing was just a facade for movie set. “That’s why the door to the men’s bathroom is clear glass! That’s why you can’t register for classes online! That’s why everyone is so well dressed!”