Romain Gary

A recent talk by a novelist at the English university of the bilingual province of New Brunswick was a talk premised on the audience being ignorant of the work of Romain Gary.

The talk began with an insult to those of the West who failed to grasp that "other Europe" of Milosz. We, the acquisitive, we in our striving for recognition, reward, we who have not read Hamlet (one supposes.)  Or not understood Hamlet.

And surely none of us in the audience displaced, dispossessed, unemployed ...

The one Lithuanian in the audience had not heard of Romain Gary (!) let alone read Education or Cerfs.  Some present may even have seen the film, "Madame Rosa", or heard of it.

In "La Parole" Ge. Gusdorf writes of how we must mistrust the speaker who is too aware of his audience - or perhaps too sure.

In fairness, the opening words which I heard concerned the trove of documents concerning partisans in the years 1944-1948 and the talk closed with an admission that our author had worked from secondary sources.

My initial reactions were posted on Facebook.  At the close of the talk I mentioned The Painted Bird, but this seemed to pass unnoted.  There is a parallel between the story of the re-submission  and rejection of that manuscript and the view Gary took of himself in the hey-day of his Emile Ajar personna.  The gap between 1944 and the 1987 Klaus Barbie trial is almost that which our writer invoked and that of Education and Cerfs.

But Gary was not simply a French novelist.

By 1953, no assassin came stalking Milosz. Or do the KGB records read otherwise?  And then came '54, then '56, '67.  Who are we supposing lived in the sunny light of ignorance? Children?

By 1980 there was no feigning ignorance of the role of Milovan Djilas.

By 1980 we had Nikolai Tolstoi's Victims of Yalta.

What is this requirement for historical documents and "distance". Reconciliation? Truth?

notes:

1945: Éducation européenne
1975 : La Vie devant soi (as Emile Ajar)
1980: Les Cerfs-volants

Firing Teachers: an alternative

I come from a university that started as a "Normal" school for teachers - a one year program to turn high school graduates into public school teachers on the the Canadian prairie.

I started at a large university some miles north where there was a huge Faculty of Education.  What was so painful was to see how very often the least talented went directly from high school into that faculty.

Nothing has ever convinced me that a Pedagogical Training Institute should be other than a graduate facility for those with a degree in a subject which they propose to teach.

In the case of the primary grades, I would relent this far: allow the fourth year of the degree to be spent in that institute for students of demonstrated teaching ability.

I would expect such an institute to have a high failure rate.

Compare the training of air traffic controllers.  When the solution to their training needs - full simulation environments - was demonstrated, their failure rate was reversed.  We lack any such demonstration.

What to do: only hire teachers with degrees followed by pedagogical training.  For every year that the teacher performs well - including the first, as there will be no probation because in my years of experience the first year was sometimes their best - for every year of teaching graded above 85%, one month of pay is earned in reserve to a maximum of 8 months.

Why in reserve?  So that after eight years, something close to the cost of a year at university to prepare to enter another field is available.  We do not want teaching to be a dead-end or perceived as a dead-end or as a carrer from which there can be no exit.

If a teacher has a year with a poor result, that first failed year is in abeyance with regard to the reserve fund: no credit or debit is made.  With each subsequent failed year that fund is depleted by one month.  Three straight years and or a zero-balance, whichever comes first, and termination is automatic.

We also need a mechanism to allow industry to free some staff for a short pedagogical course - in the case of fields such as applied science, this can be essential to providing technical training institutes more access to a larger pool of those in the field with an idea of what is not being taught - which they can often see from the interns they fail to hire in industry.

Surely some such mechanism is preferrable to what we have now:  a poorly paid profession in which some of the more talented exit too soon and some of the less-talented remain far too long.