What is the difference between the French and the American education system? What does the word “education” mean in these countries? I have the opportunity to do my college studies in the US and the fact that I was attending the French school until last year , make me am able to see the differences between the two education systems.

I was born and raised in France so I completed almost my entire schooling career in France, from the age of 2 ½ until I was 18. The best word to describe the French education system is “austere”. First of all you start school when you are 3 years old. I think France is the only country where the children go to school so early but in the French mind, you have to start early so you can be ready to learn reading, writing, and counting when you enter elementary school. To have fun, to draw, and to discover a new social life with kids from your age is not the priority of the education system. The goal of kindergarten is to prepare the young children to learn the basics of writing and reading. When you enter kindergarten the first think your teacher says is: “you cannot talk in class unless I tell you to talk; you cannot move from your desk until I tell you to do so; you cannot chew a gum” These are the basic rules of the classroom and you have to follow them otherwise you can be assured that your parents will be called by the headmaster.

As you grow up the basics rules become stricter. I remember when I was in high school or even in middle school, when you have a cell phone, it is strictly prohibited to use it during a class; you are not allowed to send text messages, to receive a call or to check the time. Your cell phone has to be turned off and you cannot touch it.  Another example of these rules is that you cannot use Chap Stick if you have dry lips or even look at yourself in a pocket mirror. It might seem that it is really strict and that you cannot do anything in the classroom but listen to the professor, but you get used to it and finally it feels normal to not talk in class while the professor is speaking. Can you imagine my surprise when in August I came to the US for my studies and for my first math class I see people leaving the class to go to the bathroom without asking the professor, when I see people arriving late in class without any excuses, when I see people texting each other and the professor doesn’t say anything and finally when I see people leaving the classroom because their cell phone are ringing. For me it looks incredible, even now after few months spent in the US. 

After all these difference in the attitude in the classroom, one of the biggest changes for me when I came from France to the US was the grading system. In France, in the elementary school you are graded with a scale from 0 to 10. If you have a 5, it is the average and it is considered a pretty good grade. When you enter middle school the scale becomes from 0 to 20 and the professors become more and more severe. In middle school and in high school, if you have a 10 (which is the average) it is considered a good grade. To understand this way of grading, you have to understand that professors never give a grade of 20, because they say that a paper for example, is never perfect so they cannot give the grade 20. So with this mentality, the best you can have is 18 but it is really rare. So finally the goal of the teacher is not to push you and to encourage you, it is more to say it is not perfect, you have to work more.  In the US, the grading system is completely different; you use letters instead of number and I think it is less rough for a child to “receive” a letter instead of a number. I had a tough time my first semester in college with the grading system because I was use in high school that if I receive a 10/20, it was considered as a good grade and here in the US, if you get a 50%, you fail your test. This change in the way to see a test was really difficult for me, even if it seems to not be such a big modification. The average grade for the American is a 60% and it took me a whole semester to get used to it. I remember in Econ for example that I was answering half of the questions, I was thinking “well I am sure about all of my answers so I will get at least the average”. However, this did not work and I failed my exam because I got a 50%. Unfortunately, both letters and numbers are a form of judgment and I do not know if to judge someone by his work will help the student to develop his creativity, his intellect and his critical mind. So let’s talk about the difference of the goals in the French and American systems.

The main goal in the French school is to teach as much as you can to the students. We learn a huge amount of knowledge, but the funniest thing is that when we are done with school, we probably forget 70 percents of what we learned. Teachers are not really close to the students. They keep a certain distance at the beginning of the year between the students and themselves and it is almost impossible to contact them after the end of the class if you have questions about the lecture. I feel that in France professors are here to judge your work and not to help you to develop your mind. In the US, I feel that it is different. Professors are here to help the students, to make them succeed in their studies and in their lives. Professors are really easy to talk to and they do not put any distance between the students and themselves. Professors always give their e-mail address to contact them, and if you do not understand something, you always have the possibility to stay longer after the class to ask them your questions or to stop by their office hours. So I would say that the main goal in the US education system is more to develop students’ minds and to help them succeed in their school career rather than judge them.

So finally the French education system is more in the way to “produce” good students.  They really emphasize the fact that the more you learn, the better you are. Everybody learns the same thing and there is only one way to show what you learned tests. This is common to all the education systems, but what is specific in the French system is that you really have to follow certain rules for the tests. First of all, in high school, we only have tests in the format of essays. The multiple choice questions do not exist in France. To write a good essay, you have to follow so many rules that at the end, all essays look like the same because creativity is not the main focus of the essay but knowledge is. So when a professor has to correct essays, he has almost 30 same essays because we all have to write in the same way with the same content. The rule of Jensen in the book Walking on Water to not bore the reader does not apply in the French system; the rule should be “bore the reader as much as you can”; it is maybe extreme to say that but it is true. On the other hand if the goal of a professor is to see if the student understood what he talked about, I don’t think the multiple choice questions are the best way to see; it is too casual to judge knowledge by multiple choice questions.

In conclusion, I believe that French and American education system are very different and they have both some good and bad aspects, but we should keep in mind that the very first goal of education is to “develop our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream” like President John F. Kennedy said.