Back to School

The Princesses are back at school this week. This means rising before dawn and driving Princess 1 to catch the 7am bus in nearby Charbonville. But I mustn’t complain. I wake up at six thirty, pull my jeans on over my pyjamas and go straight out to warm up the car. It’s currently around – 5°C at that time of the morning.
Princess 1, on the other hand, actually has to be ready for the day. And a very long day it is too. French Lycée starts at 8am and ends at 5pm, with either one or two hours for lunch, depending on your timetable. To the irritation of all its passengers, Princess 1’s bus arrives in la Grande Ville at 7.20 before anything, including the school building, is open. This is to suit the schedule of the bus company who have another pick up to make.
There is no point in complaining about this. People do anyway, of course, and I count myself among them, but no replies are ever forthcoming from anyone in authority. Letters simply remain unanswered. The only solution, if you are unhappy with the bus situation, is for your child to become an ‘interne’ – a weekly boarder. To join the troupe of students who work, sleep and eat at their lycee.
‘No thanks,’ says Princess 1, and sets the alarm.
After hours of classes following the absurdly complicated Baccalaureat curriculum which includes excruciating maths, philosophy, Spanish, Economics etc., the Princess finally arrives home at 5.45pm and is then expected to do homework. The schoolday is, unquestionably, far too long, but then, it is hard to see how they could otherwise squeeze in such ambitious collection of lessons. It appears that the French Baccalaureat is designed to create ‘Renaissance people’ – true heirs to the great French intellectual tradition and worthy citizens of La France. The French aim not to teach subjects, but to ‘educate’. A very laudable idea, but difficult to sustain in the soundbite world of the third millennium and not necessarily much use in the job market either.
This is doubtless why many of the French still don’t take English very seriously as a subject. English is pragmatic and sensible: it works, it accommodates, it goes off at tangents. The French language and French ideas follow revered and established paths. Nothing post-1830 merits serious consideration, except possibly Sartre, but even there only time will tell.
Unsurprisingly, given the broad range of compulsory subjects, almost everyone in Princess 1’s class is taking supplementary lessons of one kind or another – usually in maths. The syllabus of which appears to have been designed by Einstein.
The teaching staff, stuck with this difficult and outmoded curriculum and large numbers of exhausted, demotivated students all of whom will have to study for at least another five years to have any hope of a decent job, suffer a deep and endemic lethargy. It is hard to see a solution. Move country, perhaps?