A recent personal experience helps explain what I perceive to be a major problem in modern French society: a lack of creativity, a fear of taking risks, a reluctance to innovate. At my eight year-old son's school, they hired a "theatre" group to coach his class over the academic year -- with the goal an end-of-term play before the parents. Rarely have I been so angered. The poor mites were pathetic pawns in the hands of these imagination-less cretins, who made them memorise screeds of text. The play was "The Nutcracker Suite" -- which one would have thought would have afforded endless chance for fun, playing it up, music, song, dance etc etc. It was a dreary 90 minutes of hell. It was as much as the children could manage to recite -- inaudibly -- their hundreds of lines. Acting didn't come in to it, let alone any semblance of enjoyment. What got me was that it was not the school itself that was responsible. That I could have handled, knowing that the staff are not exactly avant-garde (fine by me). But the organisers were a group of young thespians in their 20s! The sheer lack of imagination, the way they killed what should have been a joyous experience -- and all at the hands of a group of supposedly free-thinking students!! I was spitting.
Contrast that with the week I have just spent in Dublin, where I enrolled my 11 year-old daughter in a "music and drama camp" for a week. On Friday they put on a show: songs, recitals on the piano, finishing off with a 15 minute version of "School of Rock". All it took was a creative mind, someone to play the piano and lots of energy. And it was fantastic. Everyone had a rip-roaring time, the cast as well as the audience. Why is it possible to do that in Ireland, or Britain, and not in France? Why is it that every secondary school in Ireland or Britain will have at least one group of spotty teenagers who think they are the next rock sensation and annoy their parents practising in a garage, while in France the phenomenon barely exists. Why do the French feel happiest following well-travelled paths? Why do they fear stepping out of line? In the Anglo-Saxon educational system, the end-goal is to get children to think for themselves. Here it's to cram them from without. Hateful.