TWO CENTURIES OF FRENCH EDUCATION IN NEW YORK , livre ebook

CALEC - Flatau Ross Jane

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125 pages

English

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The globalization of schooling has become a lively focus for research in the field of international education; however, few scholars have looked at specific model “global” schools. This history of French schools outside of France, and specifically French schools in New York, proposes that the network of over 490 French schools in 130 countries constitutes a fruitful field of research into globalization in practice in elementary and secondary education. A case study of the Lycée Français de New York (1935 – present) and other French schools in New York explores how the French national education system functions not only beyond the hexagon of France itself, but also beyond the strictly colonial “civilizing mission” that was advanced by French schools in both French colonies and former colonies. The history of these New York schools, dating back to the early nineteenth century, also provides insights into French cultural diplomacy and the changing nature of Franco-American relations through the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

Dedication   7

Praises   9

Preface   13

Acknowledgments   19

Introduction   23

The Creation of the French School at Home & Abroad   33

Cultural Diplomacy & the Role of French Schools Abroad   55

The Economical School & French Education Before 1934   67

French Education in New York After 1934   91

The View from Paris & Agency for French Education Abroad   123

Adaptations & Revolutions at Lycée Français de New York   143

New Publics, New Directions in French Schools   165

Conclusion   179

Bibliography   187

Notes   197

Index   215

About the Author   221

About TBR Books   223

About CALEC   225

Sujets

Social History

Histoire

Nueva York

History

French

New York

France

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Publié par	CALEC
Date de parution	10 mai 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781947626171
Langue	English

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Extrait

The Bilingual Revolution Series

Copyright © 2020 by Jane Flatau Ross
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.
TBR Books is a program of the Center for the Advancement of Languages, Education, and Communities. We publish researchers and practitioners who seek to engage diverse communities on topics related to education, languages, cultural history, and social initiatives.
CALEC - TBR Books
750 Lexington Avenue, 9 th floor
New York, NY 10022
www.calec.org | contact@calec.org
Front Cover Illustration: Jonas Cuénin
Cover Design: Nathalie Charles
ISBN 978-1-947626-47-8 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-947626-16-4 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-947626-17-1 (eBook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019952057
Dedication
To my husband, Alfred Ross, and children, Adrian and Caroline, whose boundless enthusiasm and encouragement gave me the extra strength to complete this project, and to my parents, sister, and brother who have always inspired me.
Praises
Jane Ross has not only written a marvelous history of the Lycée Français de New York, bringing to that analysis deep insight gleaned from three decades teaching in the school. She has also illuminated what this story reveals about French cultural diplomacy, French-American relations, and the challenges educators have faced adapting French ideas about education to new times and diverse locales across the globe. This book makes an important contribution to the study of international education, dual language learning, and a fascinating dimension of New York City’s history over the past two centuries .
—Herrick Chapman
Professor of History and French Studies
New York University
Jane Ross tells the story of Two Hundred Years of French Schools in New York as a compelling and unique chapter in the history of bilingual education. In Ross's account the New York schools are similar to other bilingual ventures in the goal of truly advancing student's bilingual capacity and understanding of both cultures, but also unique in the significant role of the French government's tight control of these U.S. based schools making them truly an outpost of the education offered in France itself. It is a compelling story for anyone concerned with bilingual and bicultural education .
—James W. Fraser
Professor of History and Education
New York University
Education has played a major role in shaping French identity. What happens when it becomes international? Jane Ross’ intimate knowledge of French education in New York allows her to draw on that case study to tell a fascinating story about the evolving role of education as a key instrument of French soft power. Her book should become required reading for anybody interested in French soft power .
—Jean-Marie Guéhenno,
French Diplomat, former Under-Secretary-General
at the United Nations
The French government maintains over 490 Francophone schools around the world, of which one of the most renowned is the Lycée Français de New York. Jane Ross taught there for thirty years. Her engrossing history of French education in New York is thus a unique blend of insider experience and scholarly investigation .
—Robert O. Paxton,
Professor Emeritus of History,
Columbia University
In this wonderfully engaging book Jane Ross restores to view a little-known dimension of French educational rayonnement in the US. A must read for anyone seeking to understand the cultural ambitions of global France today .
—Alice L. Conklin,
Professor of History
Ohio State University
With deft scholarship and engaging prose, Ross clearly lays out 200 years of French education in New York City, enriching our understanding of French history, Franco-American relations, and the rich potential of global schooling initiatives - including increasingly necessary heritage language programs - in creating truly intercultural citizens .
—Kimberly Potowski
Professor of Hispanic Linguistics
University of Illinois at Chicago
In this elegant mix of memoir and serious historical and scholarly investigation, Jane Ross directs our attention to the achievement of French schools abroad in accomplishing important and evolving cultural work for the French nation since the 19th century. Her analysis is rich and complex, for in such schools as the Lycée Français de New York, the educational experience is not uni-directional or even merely bi-lingual: American students learn French; alongside them French students learn English, and speakers of languages other than French and English learn both. Ross has a firm hand both on the historical role of French education abroad over two centuries—that of preserving various cultural and political articulations of “Frenchness” -- and the layered, complex, global education inevitably taking place in the classrooms of French schools overseas today. For anyone who has studied between two languages, who has been a student of France, French heritage, and culture, and who is deeply interested in the transformative power of international education, Two Centuries of French Schools in New York: The Role of Schools in Cultural Diplomacy is a must read .
— Celeste Schenck
President
The American University of Paris
FOREWORD
From French Identity to Global Education
What a fine idea Jane Flatau Ross had at the beginning of this beautiful study, to evoke the image of her French ancestor Henri Chapiers, who at age fourteen joined the troops led by the Marquis de Lafayette. The young Frenchman set off bravely to come to the aid of the American revolutionaries—claiming to be a surgeon! Behind him, more obscurely, we can discern his mother, a midwife who knew how to read and write. Chapiers subsequently decided to remain in the young republic. Thus began a familial tradition that has nourished the author’s imagination and inspired both her vocation as a teacher and her determination to explore the teaching of French in New York over the course of two centuries, in order to understand its importance and its meaning.
A Palpable Connection
From the outset, one aspect of Ross’s work that makes it so immediately engaging is the palpable connection linking the researcher closely to her object of her study, a connection that is reinforced throughout the book and constitutes its guiding principle. We meet Ross first as a young American student in Grenoble, where she discovers French education at the Lycée Stendhal; next, we see her working as a substitute teacher at the Lycée Français de New York, the prelude to a thirty-year-long career at the school, where she would hold several different positions. In particular, Ross contributed directly to the introduction in 1998 at the Lycée of the Option Internationale du Baccalauréat (OIB), a program that in the United States allows high school students to simultaneously fulfill the graduation requirements of the French “Bac” and the American Advanced Placement Program. Ross left the Lycée in 2003 to devote herself to a new adventure, the French Heritage Language Program, undertaken by the FACE Foundation (French-American Cultural Exchange), even though it initially seemed of scant importance. Her discrete presence and her nonetheless focused and effective efforts at the heart of this association were in keeping with a familial heritage that, while feeding the questions that fuel her research, also contributes to lending her account here its vividly concrete character.
Yet Ross’s personal involvement in the story she tells never prevents her from maintaining a necessary scholarly distance, not least by virtue of the range of the sources she consults, from all the expected archival collections to interviews with a variety of figures, both American and French. Indeed, Ross’s systematic reliance upon her interviews reveals anew just how interesting oral history can be. Ross’s approach accordingly enables her to articulate the relationship between her case study and overarching issues, as her subtitle, The Role of Schools in Cultural Diplomacy , expresses perfectly. Ross’s persistent effort to balance fieldwork with the institutional perspective is likewise among her work’s other great strengths.
The Paradox of the French School System
Ross begins by recalling the distinctiveness of French education outside France vis à vis the analogous approaches of other developed countries. The French system is unusual in not being reserved only for expatriates, to enable their children to pursue the national curriculum. Rather, the French approach is one of the most important means for protecting and developing French linguistic culture—indeed, it is a weapon of diplomatic “soft power.” For this reason, education in French outside France itself is largely open to local students as well as to foreign students attracted to French culture. Overall, overseas educational institutions in which French nationals constitute the majority of students are very rare.
Yet while highlighting this reality, Ross also shakes up received ideas—and this is by no means the least interesting aspect of her work. The most familiar image of French education is its steep hierarchy with, at the summit, the leading role played by the national Ministry of Education and, in line with this hierarchical structure, an emphasis on uniformity and simplicity that is at once the system’s strength and its weakness. Yet throughout her book, Ross reveals the diversity and the complexity of the French educational system abroad—for example, the fact that a great many of its institutions abroad, if not the majority, are private, with a board of directors independent of the French authorities.
The system of French education abroad was initially developed under the aegis of the Mission Laïque Française (the French Secular Mission, founded in 1902), which was likewise independent of the French government, even if de facto informal links between them have