News
February 24
In the big lecture hall at Sciences-Po, having a class during sunset is torture -- the wide windows let in the last warm orange rays until the blackness is lit only by the sallow fluorescent lights above. The temperature of the room drops ten degrees in the absence of sunlight.
In a recent lecture there, geography class made the transition from boring to painful just as the sun sank below the horizon. Some know-it-all student had been extemporizing for several minutes when my friend Frank leaned over and pointed to him.
"That guy is a knowledge-[crapper]," Franck said in English. Frank is German, and apparently Klugschei??er is a colorful way to describe that teacher's pet who seems to have the answer to every question.
There are quite a few of these knowledge-[crappers] (also known in German as sock-lickers, according to Frank) at Sciences-Po, perhaps because it's an extremely selective university - these students have a lot of knowledge to crap.
Most of the French students at Sciences-Po spent two years after high school taking intensive classes to prepare them for the entrance exam - without any guarantee that they would pass.
But they also work like dogs. There are hundreds of international students at Sciences-Po, from every continent, and most of us seem to agree - those French kids need to step outside and cleanse their lungs of stale library air.
I've come to understand some of the pressure put on French kids, though, especially when it comes to grades. Grades are public information in France; there is nothing personal or private about them.
Professors often begin class by handing back homework individually, announcing what each student has done right (usually not much) and what he has done wrong (e.g. managed to attain his current age with such a woefully inadequate collection of knowledge).
In my geography class, our first test was a particularly bruising experience. Madame didn't bother to grade most of our papers, as the majority were "not sufficient" or "not at all sufficient" - a meaningless nuance, I might add.
"This is France," she would inform my class of international students, as if we weren't aware. "You must take care over your work."
Duly noted.
But it's not just the openness of grades in France that crushes students into submission. The grading scale has the same effect, since the highest marks are virtually unattainable.
One professor and former student at Sciences-Po, Marc Germanangue, was kind enough to explain the grading scale, which goes "theoretically" from 1 to 20.
"Nobody can get a 20," Marc began, unless three conditions are fulfilled: "First, that God exists, which remains to be proved. Second, that He takes exams - and who knows why He would bore himself doing such a thing? And third, that He passes the exam without concluding that He hasn't already attained perfection in His earthly creations."
"Who could get a 19?" Marc continued. "An excellent professor, really exceptional - but such a thing doesn't exist, since the profession is too poorly regarded and too poorly paid."
"An 18?" Marc was clearly relishing disillusioning a simple American student raised on the generous ABC way of grading. "Your professor could get an 18, but he won't mess around taking his own exam. He'd be too afraid of failing."
And so on. French professors, like timid opera singers, just don't want to make full use of the scale.
To be fair, some top French universities have purposefully instituted a policy of grade inflation to help their students get accepted at foreign institutions. Imagine the poor French student who must explain to an American admissions board that, really, a 14 out of 20 is quite good.
And what exactly does a 14 mean? A firm grasp on the subject, elegance and competence in expressing this knowledge - but not much beyond that.
Ingest. Regurgitate.
Not that the French have lost any of their long-standing faith in education, which dates to Montaigne in the 16th century and to Condorcet in the 18th, who saw education as invaluable toward personal and social progress, respectively.
The tumultuous 19th century viewed public education as a means to liberate the people from emperors and monarchs, freeing them to build their own republic - an attitude personified by a character in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, General Lamarque.
"From identical schooling comes an equal society!" the general proclaims atop the barricades during the 1832 uprisings, as written by Hugo. "Instruction! Light! Light!"
These breathless ideas have not exactly come to fruition in the 21st century. Social equality remains elusive, and "identical schooling" has produced to some degree "identical thinking."
To be sure, this thinking is at quite a high level, but it seems that a university like Sciences-Po, charged with training its students for the challenges of a rapidly evolving society, ought to encourage in them a little creativity.
There will always be knowledge-crappers, sock-lickers, and brown-nosers - but a few more innovators, trendsetters, and leading lights would be quite welcome.
