Our schools are better than yours and other cultural clashes

Lunch with the ladies at Rome Accueil yesterday. Most of them have older kids in elementary school or lycée who attend the Lycée Chateaubriand, the school for French kids in Rome. They go on and on about what a terrible school the Chateaubriand is. It has, if I understood the discussion correctly, been contaminated by Italian notions of going easy on kids.

"And do you know" Genevieve was saying as I was mowing down my lasagne, "that I called my son to leave a message on his mobile while he was in class, and would you believe it, he answered the phone while in class and then excused himself from class to talk to me on the phone?? And the professeur didn't care at all!"

There were many other shocking and funny anecdotes, but the best anecdote of all was the attitude of the Italian kids to exams. Apparently, there are three sets of exams per year at the Lycée Chateaubriand. The French kids diligently study and take all exams. The Italian kids diligently study and take the first set of exams. If their mark on the first set of exams is high, they skip the next two sets on the grounds that they are "ill" or whatever, so as not to lower their average. And the school buys into it. In France (as anywhere else, I would think) you would get a zero on the exams you did not take and your average would be the mark you received on the first exam divided by three. Here, you just get the mark that you received on the first exam. Amazing.

"And do you know," Genevieve went on, "that we were at an Italian couple's home for dinner the other evening and they asked us if we had children and I said that we had three kids and that they attended the French lycée and do you know what the woman said to us? She was so surprised and she said, 'Ma è troppo severa, il sistema francese, sinora'."

The other French ladies around the table gasped. Too severe? Our school system? This was actually news to them. The Italian system mollycoddles children and gives them no sense of personal responsibility. How could they possibly judge us?

I remained silient through all of this discussion, thinking throughout that both the French and the Italians were 100 percent correct about each other's school systems.