Every child in France went back to school the first week of September. The French call it la rentrée—literally, the return—and it means more than the return to school.
It’s the time when vacations end, everyone goes back to work, and shops and businesses which may have been closed during the long summer holidays return to their normal schedules. Here on the Côte d’Azur, the summer visitors go home. The lines at the grocery store are shorter, and it’s easier to park. The villages have a feeling of settling back into routines. And the schools reopen their doors.
This is our twin daughters’ second year in a French collège; they are in quatrième, the equivalent to the American eighth grade. When we moved to France from the States, we agonized over sending our daughters to either a French school or to an Anglophone school – our thinking being that they would learn more French and French culture in a French school but would be happier amongst other English speakers. Culture triumphed over happiness and we enrolled our frightened and unhappy daughters in the international section of a semi-private French school, where they are taught about one-third of their classes in English and the rest in French. We say semi-private because their school is a private Catholic school but receives public money; except for the occasional visit from a Sister or a Brother and fish on Fridays, there is no religion in the curriculum. There are also a number of international schools in the region, where the curriculum is based on the English or American educational systems. There are, of course, the public, state-run schools as well: all French, all the time. We chose this school because it made the most sense for us: attending it would mean that our children were immersed, during school hours, in the French curriculum, language, and educational culture, but also continued to have some education in English and with English-speaking students.
We spent a year or more before our move unraveling the differences between the U.S. and French systems. Just the name of each grade was a challenge. Where in America the grades begin with first and work their way steadily towards 12th at the end of high school, the numbering system in France is reversed for some of the years and totally different for others. Students in their last year but one of lycée, or high school, are in their première année; the numbering then goes up as the age goes down until the numbered years stop at sixième, or the U.S. sixth grade, when students enter collège, the equivalent of American middle school. French primary grades are known by letter abbreviations: CP for first grade, CE1 for second, CE2 for third, CM1 for fourth, CM2 for fifth.
Instead of the nearly annual round of state-administered standardized testing in American schools, there are two national exams given in French schools. The first is the Brevet des Collèges, which students take at the end of troisième, and the second is the Baccalauréat, taken at the end of the terminale year, and required for entering university. Unlike in America where we feel that everyone should be given a chance to be a neurosurgeon even long after it is clear that they did not invent hot water, in France the students who do not pass the Brevet at age 16 stop their academic education and begin work as an apprentice in a trade or attend a school for technical training.
And so last September our daughters joined the class of cinquième internationale at their school. Before moving to France, they had been enrolled in a public school in an affluent suburb of Washington, DC – their friends the children of congressmen and White House officials and their neighbor across the playground, the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court; now they were in a small school in a French market town. There were plenty of adjustments, and they began before school even started, with the purchase of school supplies. Part of the rentrée ritual is attending to the liste des fournitures scolaires. Before I became the parent of French school children, I often marveled at the amazing range and variety of notebooks and binders and pads and folders in French papeteries, paper stores. Now I understand that all those brightly colored notebooks in different sizes and shapes are not only fanciful but are also in fact deeply specialized. Students and parents spend the weeks leading up to the rentrée combing the aisles, filling their baskets with just what the teachers requested on the liste of school supplies. It’s all part of the system of turning out French citizens: one small part of becoming French is learning the difference between a répertoire and a protège-cahier. From a school system that relied heavily on photocopied worksheets and packets, they have changed to a school in which, if there is a diagram that the teacher wants the students to have, she draws it on the board and they all copy it. It matters what kind of pen they copy it with, and in what color ink, and on what type of paper, in what type of notebook. The girls’ school notebooks are straight-underlined, color-coded marvels of organization.
School starts shortly after eight in the morning and ends at different times on different days. Wednesdays are half days: I pick up the girls at noon. Other days differ. Sometimes it’s three o’clock, sometimes four fifteen, occasionally five. Different days, too, bring different classes: some days they have two hours of French, an hour of physics, study hall —here it’s called permanence— and then another hour of French before finishing off the day with history. The next day might have no French, more physics, some English, and they might not see their history teacher again until the end of the week. I didn’t have a schedule like that until I got to university. Consequently, my daughters have had to learn to plan out their homework. If they don’t have anything due on Tuesday but do have work assigned for Friday, then they do the Friday work. It’s a lesson many adults I know are still trying to learn.
Every Friday in our American school, the girls came home with photocopied notices in their backpacks – the work of the Parent Friday Photocopying Committee. Notes from teachers about what the class would be studying; notes from the parent organization about fund-raising projects; notes from the room parents about class parties; notes from the school administration about policy changes. In France there is less waste and less parent involvement: last year the girls brought home perhaps a half dozen notices over the entire year. When the teachers need to let the parents know something, they tell the students. The students write it in their carnet de suivi-agenda, a cross between a school handbook and an engagement calendar that each of them is given on the first day of school, and next day the teacher checks each carnet for the parents’ signature that attests to having read the communication. Fortunately, we have twins. If we average what the two of them write in their agenda, we usually get the information we need.
The best part about the French school system, though, is the vacation schedule. What the French school system comprehends and Americans still struggle to understand is that after six weeks of school, you need two weeks of vacation to reopen the mind. La Rentrée happens at the beginning of September. Then there’s a long slog until…the end of October, when it’s time for ten days off around All Saints’ Day, Toussaint. Back to the grind until the end of December, and then: two weeks off for Christmas and New Year’s. The winter days are short and night falls fast, but just when it starts to feel like drudgery, two more weeks off at the end of February or beginning of March. The spring might look like a long haul until school ends at the fin juin, but don’t worry. Two more weeks off in April, and then assorted long weekends in May. The vacation schedule is nationalized, as well. All of France is divided into three zones—A, B, and C—and the winter and spring vacations are staggered, so that, over the course of four weeks, the regions in Zone A might have vacation during weeks one and two, Zone B, during weeks two and three, Zone C, during weeks three and four. The whole country vacations together over Toussaint and Christmas. The girls finished school in the last week of June last year, and so, even with nearly eight weeks’ holiday during the school year, they still managed to have more than two months’ summer break. I am told that in most French families both parents work, but then, French employees are famous for the amount of vacation that they receive and take. It’s another small piece of acculturation, I think: time with the family, away from work and school, is important. Take a day off. In fact, take two weeks. You’ll feel better.
What we quickly realized was that the goal of the French education system is to turn out French citizens: citizens who know the country’s history and culture (and, of course, some mathematics and physics and biology, too). The teacher’s desk is at the front of the classroom, usually on a small platform, and the students’ desks are arranged in rows below. The teacher lectures; the students take notes. When an adult enters the room, the students stand; all adults are Madame and Monsieur and vous, never tu. There are class discussions, but they tend not to be the free-wheeling sessions that our girls knew in their American schools. It’s not about what the kids think, it’s about what they are taught. My daughters have studied Molière and Shakespeare, Madame Curie and Madeleine L’Engle. They can distinguish between a Romanesque arch and a gothic arch at fifty paces. They are taught history and literature here at a sophisticated level, as though those subjects are significant, important things to know about. Mathematics and the sciences are taught at a slightly less advanced level than at the girls’ American school: but then, if they had continued on the math trajectory they had begun in fifth grade, they would have taken university-level statistics in their final year of high school, having knocked out calculus at age 16. So perhaps slowing that down a bit is not such a bad idea. The school is offering them an education in Western civilization. The curriculum is less concerned with nurturing their creativity than it is with making sure the students can tell the difference between a sonnet and an ode. It’s a completely different take on education. Because our daughters are good at taking notes and memorizing lessons, they have cracked the code of French school culture, and so they are happy to be dropped off every morning at the gates.
What do we, the parents, think, a year into our international school experience? We would do it again; we’ll continue to do it. Our children are learning. They are happy. As parents, we dare ask for nothing more. Yet there is something more. Whether they use their French as adults or not, they will always know how to take clear lecture notes and remember them; they’ll always know what it’s like to have vacation time honored as much as work time; they’ll always know their way around a papeterie. There will always be some part of our children that is almost French.
