To me it was incredible that a high school should not have a library, at least for reference purposes, and I said so. " Why?" M. Cohen asked, a pained look in his eye: " School work keeps our students very busy. They wouldn't have time to use it anyway."
" Don't you admit the value of any cultural education, along with farming and outdoor sports?"
M. Mourni, exploded: " Culture! Culture!", He threw up his hands, " These students are backward and ignorant. What do they need culture for? Mr. Lisker, you're new here, and you're jumping to conclusions about a situation about which you know nothing. I've taught here for years, and you're trying to tell me what these dullards need? An intellectual life? Nonsense! Let me give you an example that may help you to see the way things really stand at Pierrefonds.
"When I first came here I thought the way you did: I, too, wanted to bring culture to Le Prieuré . I thought: they need something edifying in their lives! Very well : I set aside an hour on Saturday afternoon for culture. Art appreciation once a week! I played records of the symphonies of Beethoven. I spoke to them about our great French classical writers. I tried to introduce them to modern ways of thinking.
"And what did they do, those budding young minds ? After the second week I didn't have a single customer. They were all out on the field, playing football! "
Mourni wiped his glasses, then gazed at me over his moustache in that mocking, insinuating manner habitual to him:
" You won't find any intellectuals here, Mr. Lisker. Get that idea out of your head. Just stick to teaching English. The moment they graduate these students are going to step into their father's businesses. Why should they bother to learn anything? They have no worries ! If you try to introduce them to something different from what they already know, you'll just end up by making them unhappy."
Mourni's story was a revelation. Evidently the faculty were going to pose as much of a problem as the students. It was clear to me that my job and my sense of responsibility towards educating my students were bound to come into conflict. Under slightly different circumstances, given the economic difficulties of living in a foreign country, and knowing that I probably wouldn't be staying long at the job anyway, I might have resigned myself to doing only what was asked of me and nothing more: drilling a useless language into the heads of students who would never make any effort to learn it. Perhaps I should have picked up my adequate pay check at the end of each month and dashed off to Paris where, for me, the real excitement lay. Isn't that the way most of the other artists and writers of my acquaintance dealt with the resented burden of a teaching job? As friends and fellow teachers assured me, the abysmal mental climate o fLe Prieuré didn't really concern me.
What can I say? This was May, 1968 ! Above and beyond the demands of the students at Nanterre that began the uprising, ( destined for the most part for jobs in social work and the civil service and angry because their training didn't correlate with the job market ) , or the demented rant of the Maoist cliques determined to institute a Chinese-style cultural revolution - neither of which had much appeal for me - a radical mise en question of the very purposes and content of education was then raging in every institution of higher education, many of the lycées , and, in some places, even the elementary schools.
Because of the prevailing historical conditions it was impossible for me to just sit back and watch. The problem of making some contribution to the student movement had preoccupied me for some time . I was totally out of sympathy with demonstrations in which paving-stones were thrown at the police, and automobiles set on fire with Molotov cocktails. Sharing the commitment to the goals of the student movement , I had no use for its methods. In this setting there might be a chance to actually do something in a small way in support of the common cause . Less than a week after my arrival at I'd determined to bring La Revolution to Pierrefonds!
Even the conservative educators surrounding me conceded the necessity for major reforms at the school. The situation in English language instruction was particularly appalling. I was hard put to find even one student who ( apart from ètienne) after as many as eight years of classroom instruction, was able to put together a single English sentence. Although my students ranged in age from 13 to 19, I used the same grammar book and reading materials, and assigned the same homework to all my classes, a sure indication that no one had made any progress since they were first introduced to the study of languages as toddlers.
One might wish to entertain fatuous speculations to the effect that this situation reflects some sort of legacy of the Hundred Year's War: burning Joan of Arc at the stake may have ended forever any vestige of French willingness to master the language of the " Goddam's"! However, in every class there were a few students who'd been to England. The little they'd managed to pick up there on their own was worth more than all of their years of studying.
Then the number of years of study varied within each class, not between classes! Students of the same age were put together in the same room, quite apart from their background of instruction. Their presence in the room was dictated by their being ranked as Troisième, Seconde, Première, etc., and nothing else. In Seconde A I was confronted by a student who didn't speak a word of English. Not one! There was nothing wrong with his intelligence; finally I asked him point-blank how long he'd been studying English. It transpired that he had no background in English at all. He'd entered Le Prieuré earlier in the school year, from a school where he'd been studying German. The only foreign language offered by this school was English. Because he was in the age group of Seconde, he was placed in that English class. Such mishaps reflected the general hostility of the Abbé towards all things foreign.
I never had a chance to attend M. Mourni's courses in French literature,( which, I am certain, was also in the curriculum only at the insistence of the French government). Judging from the opinions he eagerly shared with us over the dinner table, one can speculate that his lectures demanded very little from the imaginations of either his students or himself. One could not have expected any exposure to any of the literatures of the world outside the French classical canon. Witness étienne 's ignorance of the existence of an author named Shakespeare.
(To be fair, my personal experience with American high schools suggests that few of them offer anything beyond Shakespeare's plays, Victorian novels, a novel or two by some well-known or contemporary American novelist, Hemingway for example, or perhaps a dash of multi-culturalism: Amy Tan, Alice Walker, etc.)
At the heart of this cultural vacuum one could still find a dedicated chauvinist like M. Hearn to inform me, snidely and repeatedly, that all Americans were narrow-minded specialists!
One must be fair to the faculty: they had often attempted to remedy the situation. Mourni does deserve some credit for his efforts, however flat-footed , at establishing a cultural forum on Saturday afternoons. In Père Joseph's office students could find copies of Le Monde and other newspapers, a few dozen records of classical music and a tape recorder.
Performing arts at Le Prieuré were restricted to the screening of ancient movies, some dating back to the 30's, all of them stamped with the personal Imprimatur of the Abbè.
Needless to say there was no civic or political discussion, no social activism or community service at Le Prieuré. As if there could be no better authority than himself, Mourni assured me that he told his students about everything that was happening in the outside world. The students had their own club-room used mostly for watching television on an outmoded second-hand set the Abbé had purchased as a sop to popular demand.
One might have expected that, with respect to the specialization , Agricultural Engineering, in the service of which all other interests had been suppressed, the quality of education would be commensurate with the enormous tuition exacted from the families of the school's student body . It was therefore somewhat surprising to discover that Le Prieuré was a farming school without horses, cows, pigs or sheep, indeed without any sort of farm animal, also without barns, hay, beans, cabbage fields, fruit trees or, in fact, all those things one generally expects to find on a farm. Such traditional essentials, along with familiar accessories like shovels , rakes, hoes. hoses, tractors, reapers, etc. , were subsumed under the all-encompassing expression: travaux practiques : Le Prieuré had no place for them. Here only theory was studied : physics, forestry, soil chemistry, statistics: disciplines necessary and sufficient to pass the BAC. (The French equivalent of the GRE)
It is true that I am not qualified to say if a farming high school without a farm is as reasonable as a civil engineering school without bridges, or, as I suspect, as senseless as a violin school without violins. It merely reiterates the opinion of every student who spoke to me about this issue, which was to the effect that two years of travaux practiques gave them more usable knowledge than the entire curriculum at Pierrefonds. Further confirmation of this assessment was to be found in the majority opinion among the faculty themselves, to the effect that the 'education' they were providing was useless. In line with the prevailing climate of cynicism they would then go on to say that, being rich, these students didn't need to know anything anyway!
Not that standards were lax, or laziness encouraged. Despite all the inadequacies in the curriculum, the students were snowed under by work. So over-burdened were they from dawn to dusk that any exercise of independent initiative or thought was not to be imagined. That there were no extra-curricular activities was explained by the absence of any free time in which to hold them. The school day began at 8 in the morning and, on some days, went on until 9 at night. Combining classes, sports, gymnastics, and laboratory work, the roster added up to 40 hours of instruction , not counting the time required for homework and study. The argument was constantly being made to me that additional courses or activities would only increase the already crushing burden: therefore the system as it existed was already perfect! Being myself a life-long devotee of the doctrine that 20 hours of imaginative teaching are of more educational value than 40 hours of drudgery, I excuse myself for not taking such arguments seriously.
To my point of view it's apparent that two hours of practicing the piano does more to make one a musician than a year's study of aesthetic theory. A profound acquaintance with Newtonian mechanics will not help one's game of ping-pong nearly as much as holding a paddle once in while. The theory of the cow must be of only limited value when confronted with the cow itself! In the same way, it was more than reasonable to ask of the typical graduate of Le Prieuré : what did he really know about his field apart from what was necessary for the examination sheets of the BAC?
I could not rid myself of the unfortunate suspicion that the administrators of Le Prieuré would not permit the sons of the wealthy to soil their hands with cow manure. Yet anyone who wants to learn modern scientific methods of farming has to do so. Afterwards I did have the opportunity to visit other agricultural schools. In all of them, practical farming was an integral part of the program of study.
I'd now been at the school a little more than a week. In a conversation over breakfast with Père Joseph, I made the rhetorical suggestion: " What do you think? Do they need the revolution at Pierrefonds?" He laughed, " You'd better not say that to anyone else." After a moment he added, " I've given up on this school."
I presented him with an idea: " I'd like to convene a meeting of students and faculty for the purpose of discussing the things going on in Paris at the present moment. Nothing else. Does that sound innocent enough to you?"
" Go ahead! You may regret it, though."
Before announcing such a meeting Vigier and Mourni had to be consulted. They offered no objections to my proposal, and a note was placed on the school's bulletin board, inviting all interested persons to get together in the clubroom the following afternoon to discuss the student demonstrations, the general strike and related matters.
Ten students came to the meeting. Present as faculty chaperones were Vigier and Mourni; after a few minutes Mourni left. At the beginning there was nothing remarkable in anything that came up for discussion: the barricades, the violence on both sides, what merit, if any, lay in the student grievances , and the appropriateness of the government's response. These were standard topics of daily conversation around the dining tables and in the clubroom. What no one had as of yet gotten around to recognizing was their relevance to Pierrefonds.
Then I asked them: What was the purpose of education? Did anyone have any ideas? No one wanted to comment on this, so a concrete example was presented: was education possible without a library? Someone trotted out the stale rejoinder : a library wasn't needed for their studies. This gave me the opening I'd been looking for: did these studies in fact fulfill all the requirements of a real education? This was a meaningful issue for them and we tossed it around for awhile. Eventually we all agreed that a real education is one that makes students aware of their natural potential, and helps them develop it.
" Suppose one of you has a gift for painting . Is it possible to develop this gift at Pierrefonds?"
" Jean-Pierre can draw very well."
" Good. Is he encouraged in his painting while he is here?"
" No. We're learning to become agricultural engineers."
" But you're only in high school. Did you know that there are painters who didn't decide on their career until they were in their 30's?" This observation was greeted with general astonishment.
" Suppose that, at the advanced age of 15, Jean-Pierre were to decide he might like to become a painter. Will Pierrefonds help him to do this?" They admitted that it would not.
" Don't you think it would be a good idea if a little time each week were to be set aside for to developing interests not directly related to agricultural engineering?" Everyone, even M. Vigier, agreed.
" Then what about science ? Writing?" They already had science.
" That's applied science. What about science as a subject of interest for its own sake? What about a science club?"
What was that?
" Students interested in science come together, say once a week, to discuss mathematics, physics, astronomy and so on ."
But there was no time for such a thing on the established curriculum.
" The trouble with the curriculum ", I said, " is that it does not provide any time for exploring possibilities. Sticking with the same example: what if drawing were available as an extra-curricular option? Someone who's never drawn anything attends a session and discovers that he likes to draw. What I hear from you is that you consider your lives already pre-determined, and you're only teen-agers." Now it was the turn of the students. I took a back seat; any more talking on my part would only be a hindrance. Despite a slight condescension in his manner, best understood as a kind of rough friendliness, Vigier was not unsympathetic to the criticism leveled against the heavy course load. Most of the students at this impromptu meeting were close to graduation and felt more at liberty to express what was on their minds. Why not have open discussions? Why waste Saturday evening on a movie nobody liked ? Why not use the time instead to organize a weekly student meeting? What about encouragement for learning things on one's own? One student went so far as to suggest that, according to his understanding of the reforms of Pope John XXIII, even attendance at Sunday Mass shouldn't be compulsory.
Fully aroused, Vigier spoke up: such a suggestion bordered on sacrilege , and he could not allow it to go unchallenged. Le Prieuré was a Christian community. Attendance at Mass was an "obligatory act of good will" towards that community. Personally he found it objectionable that there were Jews and even atheists on the faculty ( I said nothing, being both) although he had learned to live with it. Catholics however were obliged to abide by the demands of a Catholic community.
Anxious that the discussion not become side-tracked by this issue, I pointed out that it was unlikely that compulsory Mass attendance could be eliminated in the foreseeable future. Our time would be better spent on goals that we might be able to achieve. After further discussion, a list of tentative demands was drawn up:
The situation I encountered on my return can stand for a prime example of the sort of disaster that can occur when students, without experience or background, try to instigate reforms on their own initiative without outside consultation. Walking onto the grounds from the bus station that Tuesday afternoon, I encountered the whole student body assembled on the lawn at the front of the refectory. When they saw me arrive they began cheering. Several of them came up to me and wanted to know what was happening in Paris. One of them said, " You've created something here as well"