A Reflection

[jsburbidge]

After about 55 years or so, I finally used the wonders of the internet to hunt down a song which we had learned (well, we learned the chorus) in Grade 6 French.

 

It's 'L'homme de Cro-Magnon", and it seems to date back to 1946. It is, in one sense, a perfectly reasonable, albeit silly, song from a period which also gave us "I want a hippopotamus for Christmas".

 

On the other hand, what the actual f*** was our teacher thinking? There are many, many, classic short poems in French. We could have had "Mignonne, allons voir si la rose". We could have had "Recueillement". We could have had "Le Pont Mirabeau", or "Elsa au miroir". We could even have had something by Prévert. Instead, we got this piece of catchy shlock. And this was in an "enriched" class, in a Major Work programme, full of bright students. (When he was about two years older than the bulk of my classmates, Montaigne had finished the pre-university curriculum of his day, which involved rather more foreign language study than we ever had.)

 

Most of this was lost on us. One of us, now dead, went on to teach in French in Montreal. One served in the army, where some bilingualism was presumably of use. I learned real French when I was dropped into a Lycée six years later. I can't think of any of the rest of us who have obviously used the French we learned, and unlike Montaigne and Milton and even Wellington, our foreign language education was not yoked to the task of communicating a different culture which could live with us in later years, but merely delivered contemporary and artificial texts.