unfortunately, we learned very little French, my parents transferred us to a new school, the Collège Sévigné, on the Left Bank. The experience plunged me into yet another setting in which I was made aware of my differences from the community around me. I was an American in a school full of French children, and a boy in a sea of girls.
Established in 1880 as the first nondenominational school for young women in France, the Collège Sévigné had endured for nearly ninety years as a single-sex facility until the turbulentevents of 1968, when an explosion in French society pitted leftist university students against a conservative government and a tough police force. The crisis led to months of anarchy in the schools and factories, and thousands of other institutions simply stopped functioning. Seeking relief from the chaos, parents clamored for the schools where they had enrolled their daughters to admit their sons as well. I entered in the first coeducational class. In my eighth-grade class there was only me and a French boy named Jean-Yves Grindel with twenty-six girls.
It was not easy to win acceptance in such a setting, particularly since we were all skidding into puberty. Teenage Parisian girls, like their counterparts around the world, showed little interest in boys their own age. The thrill in their lives came from high school boys, even college students, who arrived at the end of the school day on their buzzing mopeds, their long dark hair and scarves trailing in the wind, cigarettes hanging lazily from their mouths. My female classmates would hop on the back of these machines, wrap their arms around the waist of the boy in front of them, and go speeding off with the sound of squealing tires and laughter. Sometimes I would spot them in nearby cafés, smoking and drinking red wine with their wire-thin admirers, while I sighed, reshouldered my book bag, and trudged home.
Though I was barred from these emerging romantic encounters, some girls still reached across the cultural divide to include me. They found my strange accent, my clumsy verbal mistakes, and even my unusual medical problems interesting. Their affection was similar to what one would show toa pet. It didn’t help that in France my name, Bobby, was the stereotypical name for a cute little dog. At the same time, there was an element of mercy in their efforts of inclusion. Some girls, recognizing that I had absorbed almost nothing of what was said in class for the first few weeks, cornered me in the corridors, at lunch, or in study hall to offer emergency tutorials before the next class.
At the time, the French national system of education, designed by Napoleon to create a uniform national standard of excellence, thrived on ranking, ordering, grading, and excluding. There was no sense that a child—especially a middle-school child—should be offered flexibility and room to grow. The goal of the system was to sort children quickly into the areas in which they would best serve the state. By the time most children were fifteen, they had been classified into iron categories that determined what they would be allowed to study, what universities they would be permitted to attend, and thus what careers they would be able to pursue—elite careers in science or government for those with the best scores, teaching careers in the humanities for the next ranks, and trades for everyone else. Once these decisions had been made, there was virtually no chance to alter the outcome.
To speed the process of sorting, schools measured, graded, recorded, and finally published results for every student by class, subject, and age group. Class rankings were announced publicly after every test, and in every subject every six weeks. Grades were based on a scale of 1 to 20. Class participation and deportment counted for a great deal. Teachers enforced disciplineby handing out extra zeros, which arbitrarily lowered one’s score and rank for the month.
The system reeked of bias
Established in 1880 as the first nondenominational school for young women in France, the Collège Sévigné had endured for nearly ninety years as a single-sex facility until the turbulentevents of 1968, when an explosion in French society pitted leftist university students against a conservative government and a tough police force. The crisis led to months of anarchy in the schools and factories, and thousands of other institutions simply stopped functioning. Seeking relief from the chaos, parents clamored for the schools where they had enrolled their daughters to admit their sons as well. I entered in the first coeducational class. In my eighth-grade class there was only me and a French boy named Jean-Yves Grindel with twenty-six girls.
It was not easy to win acceptance in such a setting, particularly since we were all skidding into puberty. Teenage Parisian girls, like their counterparts around the world, showed little interest in boys their own age. The thrill in their lives came from high school boys, even college students, who arrived at the end of the school day on their buzzing mopeds, their long dark hair and scarves trailing in the wind, cigarettes hanging lazily from their mouths. My female classmates would hop on the back of these machines, wrap their arms around the waist of the boy in front of them, and go speeding off with the sound of squealing tires and laughter. Sometimes I would spot them in nearby cafés, smoking and drinking red wine with their wire-thin admirers, while I sighed, reshouldered my book bag, and trudged home.
Though I was barred from these emerging romantic encounters, some girls still reached across the cultural divide to include me. They found my strange accent, my clumsy verbal mistakes, and even my unusual medical problems interesting. Their affection was similar to what one would show toa pet. It didn’t help that in France my name, Bobby, was the stereotypical name for a cute little dog. At the same time, there was an element of mercy in their efforts of inclusion. Some girls, recognizing that I had absorbed almost nothing of what was said in class for the first few weeks, cornered me in the corridors, at lunch, or in study hall to offer emergency tutorials before the next class.
At the time, the French national system of education, designed by Napoleon to create a uniform national standard of excellence, thrived on ranking, ordering, grading, and excluding. There was no sense that a child—especially a middle-school child—should be offered flexibility and room to grow. The goal of the system was to sort children quickly into the areas in which they would best serve the state. By the time most children were fifteen, they had been classified into iron categories that determined what they would be allowed to study, what universities they would be permitted to attend, and thus what careers they would be able to pursue—elite careers in science or government for those with the best scores, teaching careers in the humanities for the next ranks, and trades for everyone else. Once these decisions had been made, there was virtually no chance to alter the outcome.
To speed the process of sorting, schools measured, graded, recorded, and finally published results for every student by class, subject, and age group. Class rankings were announced publicly after every test, and in every subject every six weeks. Grades were based on a scale of 1 to 20. Class participation and deportment counted for a great deal. Teachers enforced disciplineby handing out extra zeros, which arbitrarily lowered one’s score and rank for the month.
The system reeked of bias
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