Euro Vista Let Them Eat Sugar-Cane
ALAN, RAY
Euro Vista By RAY ALAN Let Them Eat Sugar-Cane During the last few weeks French papers have been exhuming from their archives pictures of upturned cars and fiery barricades, and commentators have...
...Even the bac is becoming increasingly selective, with a basic bac for the hoipoiloi who will merely go to an arts faculty, and "better" bacs, requiring a higher standard of work, for those who wish to be considered for a science faculty or a Grande ecole...
...The bac, in particular, has lost its international prestige and exigent universities outside France no longer accept it as a qualification for higher education...
...her only "examination" was a brief conversation with a teacher—in French—on the Marse book...
...Moderate voters, appalled by the violence around the Sorbonne, stampeded to the Right and gave the Gaullists and their allies a record majority in the summer election of 1968...
...Euro Vista By RAY ALAN Let Them Eat Sugar-Cane During the last few weeks French papers have been exhuming from their archives pictures of upturned cars and fiery barricades, and commentators have been looking back in anger, nostalgia, scorn or sorrow at the "lost revolution" or "fools' fiesta" of May-June 1968...
...The girls who chanted slogans with them, cheered them on at the barricades, and bathed their tear gas-reddened eyes afterward, are today secretaries, saleswomen and teachers, and not a few are the mothers of nine-year old children, father unknown or half-forgotten...
...The ferment fizzled out when the government bowed to the union's main demands and granted what most economists considered disastrous pay increases (in spite, or because, of which the economy flourished until the 1973-74 oil crisis...
...Its other important consequences were baneful...
...But both Russia and China now impose tougher conditions for admission to higher education than any Western country...
...A student spokesman replied: "Plant sugar-cane...
...I can't help feeling a little sorry for the anarchists who, for a week or two, really thought that their rendezvous with history had at last arrived...
...One student who sympathized with anarchism and flirted with the Maoists is now a police inspector...
...In Britain, successive Labor gov-erments have imposed "comprehensive" schools for all pupils over 10 in the state system, in place of the old three-lane system of high-quality "grammar" schools, middle-grade "technical" schools, and "secondary-modern" schools for the supposedly undistinguished majority...
...The new system, although apparently egalitarian, may be promoting cultural apartheid by lowering standards in Britain's best state schools and persuading more middle-class parents than ever to send their children to private schools with a track-record in the race for university places...
...They told the Communist-led workers who resisted them: "We've come to destroy the machines, the instruments of capital that enslave you...
...Everywhere people are tired of capitalism and disgusted with so-called Communism...
...Its political sophistication rarely rose above that of the group of students who tried to force their way into a factory of the state-owned Renault car firm...
...His Spanish friend, after helping to plan an unsuccessful attempt on the life of General Franco, took refuge in cynicism: When I last met him he was the price-fixing agent of a furniture cartel...
...While the authorities have pretended, for demagogic reasons, that the French educational system has become less selective, selectivity has been reinforced by increasing competition for places in the tightly-disciplined Grandes icoles, where France's top administrators, engineers, teachers, and other specialists are trained...
...Teachers struck in support of the students...
...It had one lasting beneficial result: Radio news-teams managed to hold on to the freedom they acquired during the upheaval, although television has remained under governmental control...
...Anarchism is the only civilized possibility...
...But student-worker relations were uneasy...
...In Italian universities, what teachers call the "real" students are already outnumbered by youngsters who appear to have neither the grey cells nor the self-discipline for higher education: Unsurprisingly, this situation is breeding frustration, anger and recruits for the Red Brigades...
...We wanted a new society...
...Poor man...
...Select Because of the chaos in French schools and universities, most candidates for the baccalaureat (university entrance examination...
...The whole thing ballooned out of a university protest movement...
...but more often it wallowed in waffle...
...Those were, of course, the days when every middle-class teenager in tune with the true faith slept beneath icons of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara...
...they just wanted a bigger slice of the old society—mainly, more money...
...French universities now undertake little important research, and many of their courses have been lightened...
...The workers were disgusting," a student leader said later...
...Today Toulouse and Paris, tomorrow Barcelona, Milan, Berlin," said the international secretary...
...Western Communist parties are against selectivity...
...Young people, especially, are flocking to our movement—even in England...
...The university movement coined a few catchy slogans ("Be a realist: demand the impossible...
...Some British observers argue that the French system is paying lip-service to egalitarianism while reinforcing selectivity—making university entry easier while retaining a parallel, more efficient, university network in the Grandes ecoles—may be a shrewder, if more cynical, solution...
...In Toulouse, a student of Spanish literature told me that her entire (second-year) course in 1975-76 had consisted of a superficial study of a short pop novel by Juan Marse, four or five poems by Miguel Hernandez, half a dozen newspaper articles and a wine advertisement...
...We have our channels of communication...
...so were Western Maoists in their heyday, a decade ago...
...In Russian universities...
...How does a democratic society dependent for its prosperity—indeed survival?on brainpower and expertise, reconcile its need to stimulate the studious and select specialists with its natural desire to open its college gates as widely as possible...
...Access to these respected government colleges, which offer courses that are more highly regarded than those available in most faculties, is by competitive examination...
...bac for short) and university degrees in 1968 were given their diplomas on the strength of brief oral tests...
...The workers asked: "But what would we do without machines...
...More advanced adolescent thinkers also included Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi-minh, Leon Trotsky and Bakunin among their idols...
...And the French educational system suffered severe damage...
...then labor unions went on strike in order to squeeze concessions out of General de Gaulle's embarrassed government...
...Written examinations were revived the folowing year, but were of a lower standard than before 1968...
...The richness of English literature is bound to pose problems for teachers who try to acquaint their students with a representative sample of it, but in this instance they didn't even try...
...In Russia, too, things are stirring...
...I hope disillusionment hit him gently...
...Many of the revolutionary assault-troops of May 1968 now serve multinational corporations, advertising agencies, law firms and other "bourgeois rackets...
...The old system was based on over-rigid selection by examination and IQ tests at the age of 10 or 11, but it enabled many bright working-class boys and girls to go to university via their local "grammar" school...
...First-year students of English in the academic year just ended could get by with reading Arnold Bennett's An-na of the Five Towns, Samuel Beckett's shallow high-school charade Waiting for Godot, a good sci-fi novel, a hippy gagbook, and three scraps of 1940-ish Trotskyite journalism by George Orwell...
...The problem of selectivity in education is a controversial issue in several Western European countries...
...I remember standing in the Place du Cap-itole, in Toulouse, one evening, with two anarchists (one was a leading member of a conspiratorial Spanish group, the other the secretary of an international movement), watching a foolhardy figure climbing up the facade of the 18th-century city hall in order to plant a black flag on a balcony...
...Standards have remained depressed, partly in the hope of propitiating Leftist student organizations that want less selectivity in education, partly because of the agitation and disruption of courses that have occurred anyway (see NL, June 7, 1976...
Vol. 61 • July 1978 • No. 15
