Careerist
Even the waiters in France have diplomas, and it’s always a comfort to know that their disdain is the result of extensive professional training.
They begin to streamline a kid’s future here at the age of 15. Those with no academic prowess or desire are routed into trade schools where they can learn (and apprentice at) any job from pastry chef to bricklayer, from hairdresser or sales clerk to… hang on… those rude sales clerks too have been trained?
Lesson 31: Customer Service
A visibly shy woman is returning a pair of lacy undergarments to your store. Do you:
1) Tell her they smell funny so she totally wore them, gross me out, so no way.
2) Wave them in the air, yelling ‘woohoo, get load of these elephant trunks! Hot-t!’ to your friend at cash desk 1.
3) Politely ask for the receipt and process the refund.
Answer: What do you think? What am I? Your mother?
Those who are more academically inclined do one more year of general education, with sudden and unambiguous demands for real thought and personal analysis, and the option for go-getters of taking extra courses in different languages, political science, economics… Until the last two years of high school, at which time they have to choose their general direction: literary (w/ philosophy!), arts, sciences, administrative, etc.
Plus the school hours here are pretty gruelling: 8 am to 5 or 6 pm, sometimes six days a week (though, granted, they get two weeks off every six weeks. God help the working single mother).
Then it’s the dreaded baccalaureat – the exam that determines whether you can move forward, rinse repeat, or resign yourself to helping uncle Hubert sell potatoes door to door.
Then it’s on to university, learn learn learn and emerge… tada! Jobless.
My recollection of high school back in Canada is largely of a mass of kids all studying the same things, succeeding or failing, with little more guidance than, ‘so, what do you want to do with your life? Oh yeah? Well, good luck with that.’ And upon graduation being released out into the world, equipped for nothing except writing essays at 2 am because they were due in 7 hours. Despite which, we still manage to come out okay, if a little too polite for our own good.
So I’m still ambiguous about the educational system in France – one more of those occasionally daunting things about being a foreigner and forced to comply with the status quo (even the grades have weird names here – CP, CM1, backwards counting, terminale… – that I may have figured out by the time I have grandchildren).
I suppose that by the age of 15 one’s talent and/or passion for certain things has become clear, but it does seem awfully early to be making life decisions. Apart from the best and brightest, a lot of kids who don’t go to trade school seem to slump into a default, vaguely business-oriented general course that anyone with an over 50% average can get into, and emerge ready to start at the bottom.
On the upside of the French system is learning early on that actions have consequences, and awakening to the fact that, unless you’re a trust fund baby, you are going to have to work to build a life that doesn’t make you want to crawl back under the covers every morning.
The only thing more depressing than spending five years getting a Masters in literature and learning they gave the job at the bookstore to the guy with a PhD, is being the guy with the PhD applying for a job at a bookstore.
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Comment
- Hi, love your blog. I read it often from Madrid, where I’m getting a masters in literature. The other day at a party a guy who works in HR was asking what where the paths or professional opportunities after such a program. The only answer I could come up with was: Alcoholism, depression or suicide.
But we have philosophy too!
—sorry for my english, I know you care about language :)
— Ana MarÃa Sep 1, 3:29pm # - I’m 36 and still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I’ve dilly-dallied with university English but can’t afford to give up my job-that-accidentally-turned-into-a-career career (17 years now – right outta high school). Any marketable skills I (may) have, outside of my profession, were developed on my own time. I know some BA holders who aren’t much further ahead than I am, except, perhaps, in the debt department. If I ever get that “sacred” piece of paper, it’ll probably be after I retire, by which time my kids and I will be graduating together.
At least we can split the cost of textbooks.
Speaking of books, I’d picked up Jim Lewis’s The King is Dead a while back after reading your thoughts on it (and once it was in paperback). That damn Fitzgerald, Woolf, Eliot, Pinter, Bill Shakespeare et al have kept me from it.
Soon, maybe.
— Gordo Sep 1, 6:40pm # - I have a degree in English literature. I worked for several years (after I got my degree) in a bakery where every employee had one liberal arts degree or another. Even the dishwasher had a degree in philosophy. I finally ended up going back to school and getting a degree in accounting to make some decent money. However, I don’t regret at all spending four years of my life studying literature (along with history, philosophy, astronomy and numerous other subjects that I loved). I think my life has been much more interesting and fulfilling because I did.
— Cindy Sep 1, 8:02pm # - Check on the French education system. My son’s entering Terminale (tomorrow, actually) with a future as clear as mud. He doesn’t want to go to a Grande Ecole (actually it’s me who doesn’t want him to go to a GE – have you seen the kids during the first two years? They don’t need suitcases because they can carry their things in the bags under their eyes). Other French universities sound like factories, ditto Austrian ones (we’re in Vienna). I fancy UK or McGill, but – guess what – you have to apply, and my son belongs to the class of academically bright but inert 17 year olds. Know warrimean? Perhaps he should take a gap year and sit cross-legged in an ashram in India for the duration. Any ideas?
— Nick Somers Sep 3, 7:19am # - And then the minute you start working they tell you “No silly, academic papers are only for ACADEMICS, you have to translate for the ‘common man’, duh” and that makes you want to go being a student beacause you’re only good at churning out papers at jet speed.
— moizza Sep 3, 5:44pm # - Nick,
An idea : avoid a Grande Ecole (50 % of the their students are jobless one year after the end of their studies, exception : Polytechnique and Mines). Avoid universities too (I studied physics there, I even had an offer of making a PhD in a Nobel Prize’s team… being paid about 1000 euros a month, for 3 years, with no future after that other than going work in USA… hard to live with that in Paris, especially with 8 years of study). All the students who were with me at school and who have a job work in UK, USA of Norway. The others are jobless.
If I had a child in Terminale I would give him the advice of choosing a short course like BTS : you can still carry on if you don’t want to work right away, and you have a better view of the job market. 5 years are too much : the job market changes too fast, and by the time you finished, it may be radically different as when you started.
— Ted Sep 23, 9:34pm #
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