Growing Pains and Cultural Hemlines
ALAN, RAY
Euro vista BY RAY ALAN Growing Pains and Cultural Hemlines NEWT GINGRICH'S grim picture of a society in which "12-year-olds have babies, 15-year-olds kill each other, 17-year-olds have aids, and...
...but here, at least, they're still out of fashion...
...If you are working on Robert Graves' King Jesus, pay no attention to the Romans occupying Israel-Judea: they're just tourists...
...Holding back fast learners—and boring them—is as sure a method of provoking antieducational and antisocial reflexes as pushing slow learners unreasonably...
...Oversimplification becomes inevitable and opens the door to nutty dogmatism...
...anti-in-determinists (sic) and other such pranksters are withering away...
...Fortunately, French standards are still high in science and engineering and have soared in math...
...Harold Bloom got it right years ago: Like shorter skirts, authorship always returns...
...Studying" Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, one must ignore the reasons forthe Oklahomans' plight?unless Greek mythology can be dragged in...
...Unlimited education, sex a gogo, and no Hitlers or Stalins to worry about...
...As Omar Khayyam might have said, the buzzard is on the wing...
...It is the report of a congress at the University of Perpi-gnan...
...Snaffle and Curb TO MOST young people here...
...Some priests are embarrassed as well...
...The wild students of yore today shout on the floor of the bourse and pass resolutions in the marble halls of mammon...
...Happily, Shakespeare & Company and the older French and Spanish classics remain in good hands for the time being...
...But can one excuse teachers...
...A lecturer in a foreign literature may now have to waste time explaining basic grammar or usage that should have been mastered in high school...
...Some teachers, embarrassed, say: "Our pupils know more about aids than we do...
...Coincidentally or not, the baccalau-reat (the examination in eight subjects that qualifies a student for higher education ) has become easier, and this has lowered first-year university standards...
...The Catholic Church, hostile to the use of contraceptives, hesitates to bless condoms as a shield against aids, although homosexual priests need protection...
...Its Anglican offshoot, founded by Henry VIII and more tolerant of sexual idiosyncrasy, leaves the decision to the priest...
...I'm developing a theory about all those gifted French people who took to painting murals in caves 20,000 years ago...
...France's new President, the conservative Jacques Chirac, says he favors educational reforms that will help les jeunes find worthwhile employment...
...The picture may owe more to Expressionism than to statistics, but shock tactics can be useful...
...According to one high school teacher, exercises in English that second-year classes tackled easily 20 years ago are now considered difficult by fourth-year pupils...
...She pretends to frown (or is it a real frown...
...now, if he is at a university, he may be obliged to overlook the social angle unless his faculty has decreed new hemlines...
...High school vending machines already sell government-subsidized condoms at one franc (20 cents) a throw...
...England has a similar problem with its "comprehensive" schools, established by well-meaning but naive county councils trying to lower class barriers in the classroom...
...Euro vista BY RAY ALAN Growing Pains and Cultural Hemlines NEWT GINGRICH'S grim picture of a society in which "12-year-olds have babies, 15-year-olds kill each other, 17-year-olds have aids, and 18-year-olds get diplomas they cannot read" made parents shudder in France, too...
...One of France's greatest cultural achievements, after the Norman Conquest, was its infiltrating into England a Franco-Latin vocabulary that melded with the island's Celtic, Germanic and Scandinavian vernaculars and patois to create the rich, versatile international language we islanders now call, selfishly, English...
...But standards are said to have dropped lately in nonscientific subjects in colleges (junior high school) and lycees (senior high...
...Many parents leave the chore of briefing their children on the disease to teachers who have a hard enough task cramming geography into skulls stuffed with mass-media fuzz...
...Maoists, deconstructionists...
...It is rumored that even Jacques Derrida has understood that writers don't just sit around waiting for their Compaq to compose...
...But it is saddening to see cranks imposing ephemeral fads on students and fuzzing up their appreciation of the literature of the last century and a half, one of the most richly variegated periods in history...
...In France, as in modern Germany and Scotland, education is a popular issue, generally associated with enlightenment and social justice...
...ask some middle-aged folk...
...Authors are disinterred enthusiastically in some French faculties, grudgingly in others...
...A Hemingway buff in that southern university, writing a "study" of For Whom the Bell Tolls, would have to grit his teeth and avoid mentioning the Spanish Civil War...
...Marx" now means Groucho...
...On the wall opposite me is a 1994 drawing by the excellent French cartoonist Sempe...
...The writers, teachers and others mentioned are either Irish, Scots or Welsh—the offspring of peoples who, well into this century, used Saxon as an insult—or French, American or unmistakably post-Saxon English people...
...The young have never had it so good...
...I opened it eagerly, wondering what the Mediterraneans had thought of that unattractive culture, and how they and their Saxon contacts had communicated, 1,000 or more years ago, without even a package-tour interpreter to help...
...The title proved to be misleading...
...It shows a man browsing in a Paris bookstore—a mild man, puzzled and perhaps dismayed by the titles on display: The Erosion of Language, Literary Inflation, The Decline of Writing, The Twilight of the Book, The Agony of Writing, The Impasse of Writing, Literary Alienation, and Do Words Mean Anything...
...A few faculties?in a recoil, possibly, from the heavy-metal approach to socioeconomic factors?have a clear line: "No social factors at all...
...Good question, though the Academie Franchise would probably have to rule on that...
...One can drive across that spectacular new bridge in Normandy, or ride the TGV (the world's fastest train), or hitch one's satellite to a French rocket, without trembling...
...As Roy Campbell wrote, "They use the snaffle and the curb all right, but where's the bloody horse...
...not the fellow with the beard...
...This can happen anywhere, but some French universities have at times proved peculiarly vulnerable...
...Teenagers and adults alike tend to view aids as essentially a medico-financial matter, rather than a moral and social concern...
...Although Darwin and Freud were held at bay for decades, irrational monsters like Stalin and Mao enraptured thousands of students and too many teachers...
...A teacher in her late 30s tells me: "Social concerns and plots were a la mode a few years ago, and they may well come back...
...when asked if literary studies in her university are run by the haute couture industry...
...Even postgraduate students may be fed stodge like "The narrator narrates the narrative"—though that is progress of sorts...
...A university teacher reached a similar conclusion af ter testing his students with a high school English text...
...Sometimes, though, social justice is equated with the kind of negative egal-itarianism that has led in recent years to a lowering of educational standards in order to help slow learners, and a failure to provide sufficient fast tracks for brighter youngsters...
...I can excuse them: We journalists are always in a hurry, and UK soccer fans and lager louts do get a bit Saxon at times...
...No genuine Anglo-Saxons, or even Anglo-Saxon attitudes, appear...
...Are they really ignorant of the demise of Anglo-Saxon—as a language and an ethnic label...
...Aids also has become a parapolitical issue, with demonstrators demanding more financial help and free accommodation for sufferers, and teenagers clamoring for free condoms...
...Could they have been frustrated writers...
...But the millennium is a little way off...
...Saxon Culture YESTERDAY, I received a book entitled (in French) The Mediterranean World and Anglo-Saxon Culture...
...What is called a "literary study" turns out to be a study of style...
...The problems of lesjeunes (the young) featured prominently in the presidential campaign that pounded France during the first four months of this year...
...A teacher may still bypass a hapless scribbler's purpose and ignore the essence of his work...
...Problems...
...But many teenagers and parents are worried by 12 per cent unemployment and reports of drug dealing and violence in schools—afflictions French people tend to associate with the African and Arab suburbs of Paris and Marseille, but that are now spreading to smaller cities...
...In the past, a French schoolboy would have been told he was a donkey if he had written a study of La Fontaine or Zola and ignored the social conditions that influenced their work...
...There are, I know, journalists in France who think that all Brits and Americans (even if black or Hispanic) are Anglo-Saxons...
Vol. 78 • June 1995 • No. 5
