News & Weekly Letters

I’m writing to you this week from Boston, where I’m attending a conference on artificial intelligence (what else?). The conference, entitled “AI in K-12 Education–Navigating the Challenges,” is taking place at the International School of Boston. When I arrived this morning, despite the importance and complexity of the topics we were about to tackle, the primary head barely had a chance to nod in my direction before she had to rush off to deal with an all-too-familiar scenario: organizing coverage for absent staff. Rare (even extremely rare) are the days when the entire team is at school. It’s not meant as a critique, just a simple fact of school life everywhere. 

I spent part of this week in Montreal—a city where people spend their days switching between English and French, just like at The École. Sophie and I were attending an AEFE seminar on the future of French education in North America. The AEFE network comprises 25,000 students in 59 schools across the United States and Canada. The day-to-day realities of these schools vary wildly, whether it be in terms of the communities they serve, their educational offerings, or their systems of governance (in terms of the latter, The École is truly unique, thanks to the presence of Philippe and Laurence), but one of their common strengths is that they belong to this network.

I don’t know what you got up to last night, but I spent the evening dressed in a James Bond tux, having dinner with Marion Cotillard. Admittedly, it wasn’t exactly an intimate tête-à-tête; there must have been at least 500 people at the Alliance gala, but I still think it’s worth a mention. Even during a very traditional week like this one—with the costumes, the parade, Julien and Alisha’s Halloween song on repeat—something out of the ordinary always takes place. No two weeks at The École are ever the same.

Since there was no high school in the village in L’Ardèche where I grew up, I headed off to boarding school—50km from home—when I was 15. My father had the unenviable task of dragging me out of bed every Monday morning at 5 a.m. and driving me to the village square, where the school bus waited (with, incredibly, everyone smoking on board). I came home every Friday evening to spend the weekend with my family. When you arrive at a boarding school with 80 boys aged between 15 and 18, you learn pretty quickly that there is a whole set of unwritten rules you need to follow if you want to make your life easier.

This week, high school students in France are on strike. As you are no doubt aware, they are protesting their learning conditions: overcrowded classrooms, no air conditioning, aging facilities, absent teachers who are either poorly replaced or not replaced at all, interminable school days, and uncertain prospects for higher education because of Parcoursup, the platform used to apply to universities and colleges, which has never really managed to win people over, leaving too many students with the impression—rightly or wrongly—that the doors to their future are already closed.