Upton-on-line
Diaspora Edition
http://www.arcadia.co.nz
2nd December 2004
In this issue
The coronation of Nicolas Sarkozy; the regulatory wonderland of the French education system; language as a means of
cultural transmission; and the use of science in environmental policy making – a report from the NZ Parliamentary
Commissioner for the Environment
But first, for anyone interested in music and/or history travelling to Paris before January 9th…
… there is, at the Cité de la Musique (221, avenue Jean-Jaurès, Paris 75019) an absolutely stunning exhibition entitled
The Third Reich & Music. It is a brilliant account of the uses to which the Nazis put music during their eleven year regime. It covers
both popular culture and the appropriation (by association) of high culture. An audio guide is, on this occasion,
essential. It is the clever juxtaposition of musical extracts with visual exhibits that evokes the atmosphere of the
period. The tour de force is thirteen video clips of original film – everything from U-boat crews in the Atlantic
listening to popular music to Herbert von Karajan triumphantly conducting Beethoven in occupied Paris. (One wonders if
he ever came back post-war.) There is Hitler at Bayreuth, Hitler saluting a statue of Buckner in the shrine at Walhalla,
Goebbels shaking the hand of a disdainful and troubled looking Furtwangler, Leni Riefenstahl’s clips of Nuremberg
rallies, concerts at the Terezin concentration camp and Hitler Youth singing Christmas carols.
There is nothing didactic or polemical about the exhibition. Its subtlety lies in the way it enfolds the listener in the
nobility of music in the presence of such moral corruption – exactly as Goebbels himself had planned. This is still
subversive territory over which even a scrupulous museum curator cannot have complete control. Upton-on-line could not
help but notice skinheads stalking entranced through the gloom.
Allow at least three hours.
A coronation for the flat screen era
December 4th will be 200 years exactly to the day since Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself before the high altar of
Notre Dame in Paris. Was it modesty that caused Nicolas Sarkozy to avoid any tacky parallels by arranging his own
triumph in becoming leader of the governing party of France, the UMP a week earlier? If so, it was the only sign of
bashfulness in what has to be France’s slickest piece of political showmanship in a long while. In place of Notre Dame
we had a cavernous convention centre in Le Bourget (not far from where the Concorde crashed) with 40,000 party faithful
in raptures; in place of sycophantic oil paintings depicting the Great Man as a descendant of the gods, a gigantic
screen featured the penetrating gaze of the new Party President peering psycho- (or more accurately Sarko-) analytically
into the soul of the nation.
This is one of the most extraordinary political coups upton-on-line has ever witnessed. Like a cuckoo in the nest, this
brilliant media personality has stolen Chirac’s party from under his nose, all the while protesting loyalty, unity and
reconciliation. The UMP was created only two years ago with the express purpose of providing Chirac with a majority in
Parliament and a vehicle for either a third stint as President or anointing a successor. Mr Sarkozy has put paid to
that.
Chirac’s only leverage was to insist that Sarkozy must choose between the Presidency and his post as Finance Minister.
He didn’t hesitate for a moment in calling his adversary’s bluff, throwing away the most powerful cabinet job to advance
his political ambitions. (How wise: who wants to be finance minister when the budget deficit is ballooning and the only
responsible answer to public demands is ‘No”?) While a Chirac loyalist and former agriculture minister Hervé Gaymard
oversees the retreat from France’s fiscal Berezina (the battle that was the beginning of the end of the 1812 campaign),
Mr Sarkozy is now happily ensconced commanding a large and rich electoral machine that will almost certainly make him
its candidate in the 2007 presidential election.
The sheepish smiles and applause of his former ministerial colleagues said it all. Chirac did not attend but sent his
wife, Bernadette, who did a brilliant job looking delighted. Sarkozy was impeccably loyal while paying barely veiled
tribute to his own “vitality, effectiveness and engagement”. His ability to formulate perfect verbal truces that silence
critics yet leave unlimited room for manoeuvre can only remind a New Zealander of Robert Muldoon’s unflinching loyalty
to Jack Marshall in the early 1970s. “We will support the Government,” Sarkozy intoned, “because it will listen to us,
and it will listen to us because we will support it.” Got that?
Sarkozy is by far the smartest operator in French public life today. He has the communication skills – and now the
institutional base – to transform French politics. We will have to wait two and a half years to see if France is going
to allow itself to be wooed by this extraordinary Franco-Hungarian phenomenon.
Spelling it out in detail
A recent edition of upton-on-line drew attention to the care lavished on the gastronomic fate of little tummies in
Europe’s foodiest country. The recent arrival of five closely typed pages of rules from the same school where two little
Uptons are coming-on-line has provided an equally fascinating insight into how France’s schools are regulated.
Nothing is left chance. Every conceivable detail is covered. The ban on gives a flavour of the approach:
In applying the Evin law [named after its sponsor in the French style], the prohibition on smoking applies in all
closed and covered places to which the public has access or which constitute places of work as well as, within the
school, in all places not covered that are frequented by children during the entire duration of their presence. The result of this is that it is forbidden to smoke within the confines of the school in covered places as well as
non-covered places, and this prohibition is registered through clear signage. Given the configuration of the premises it has been decided,
after consultation, that the room adjacent to the staff room is to be placed at the disposition of smokers.
One concludes that parents and pupils alike should be grateful for this simplification of the loi Evin which, one
assumes, is too complicated to admit of a simple rule stating that “smoking is banned within the school grounds”.
A mammoth on the loose
Five pages for parents to absorb and sign is, it seems, no more than an amuse-bouche when it comes to the serious
rigours of the educational behemoth that resides famously in a beautiful eighteenth century residence in the Rue de
Grenelle in Paris’ 7th arrondissement. According to Le Monde, the Ministry of Education (popularly known as the
‘mammoth’) has long been regarded as having only one comparator on the planet – the Red Army. With a budget of €65
billion and a staff of 1 million (900,000 of them teachers), the Ministry tends with republican equality to the
educational needs of 14 million pupils and students.
This is the system which, it used to be claimed, enabled the Minister to know at any given hour exactly what children of
a given age would be studying everywhere in France. The machine-like qualities of this rare survival from another
bureaucratic age must chill the heart of any politician unlucky enough to draw this straw. The current incumbent,
François Fillon, has bravely announced that he is going to take an axe to the harcèlement textuel [harassment by
directives] that flows mercilessly from the pens of his functionaries. As he mounts the central staircase of the
Ministry, one wonders how many pitying smiles can be detected each morning in the portraits of his 172 predecessors.
No detail too small to be overlooked
Directives and guidance designed to speak equally to a school in the industrial suburbs of Paris or the most distant
mountain valley in the Pyrénées must inevitably originate from a remote and abstract world. As one senior insider
commented the other day: “Children often have difficulty understanding that the authors of books aren’t all dead. It’s a
bit like that with the central administration: our people sometimes have difficulty imagining that they are
communicating with living beings.”
The flavour of this colourless world is best drawn from the Bulletin Officiel. It can be located at www.education.gouv.fr/bo. New Zealand readers would have little difficulty recognising the broad lines of their own Educational Gazette (located
at www.edgazette.govt.nz). It’s just the nature of the guidance that startles. Upton-on-line happened to hit on a recent circular on how
swimming should be handled in primary and secondary schools. The complete circular ran to around 4000 words covering
everything from the objectives of swimming to the precise numbers of supervisors needed. The best bit concerned water
temperature. How’s this for precision:
A – Temperature & comfort
A feeling of thermal comfort for those participating in the learning process is essential for the successful outcome of
their instruction. Temperature, ambient humidity and wind will be systematically evaluated to take account of different
situations and different groups. For primary school classes this sensation [of ‘confort thermique’] corresponds
generally to a water temperature of 27 degrees and an air temperature of between 24 and 27 degrees. For outdoor pools,
the water temperature is generally some degrees lower than for covered pools. In no case will the temperature be less
than 25 degrees so as better to respect the sensation de confort thermique.
That was on 13th July this year. There must have been an outcry somewhere because on 15th October a fresh circular
promulgated a couple of pages of amendments including the removal of the minimum 25 degree temperature. So it seems that
young Gauls will be allowed to grow up Spartan and hardy after all!
Of course the real issue is whether this stuff ever gets read let alone enforced. Apparently the Bulletin Officiel runs
to some 3000 pages a year. It makes Anglo-Saxon systems look so laissez faire.
In stunning contrast are the rules upton-on-line has just received for Southwell School in Hamilton. They were, it
seems, drafted after the Ice Age and intended for simpler minds. Here they are:
1. Be respectful to those in authority.
2. Consider and respect others and their property.
3. Be punctual to school and classes.
4. Move quietly, safely and sensibly in buildings and on hard-surfaced areas.
5. Play/eat in assigned areas.
6. Play safely without harming others.
7. Wear the school uniform correctly.
8. Obey correct safety rules travelling to and from school.
Even parents can understand that!
Language and cultural transmission
A country which is busily defending its language as a global tongue does quite a lot of thinking and theorising about
language. With only 170 million French speakers world-wide, there is much theorising to be done. Even within the EU, an
influx of Nordic and East European countries has diluted what was once a Frankish stronghold. These pesky Vikings, Balts
and Slavs make no bones about speaking English – often by choice between one another given the linguistic distances
between, say, Danish, Finnish and Polish.
While many parents clearly want English taught in French schools, the élite still adheres to a view propounded fifty
years ago that the Franco-German axis should see German taught as France’s second language. Bright kids are supposed to
choose German because English is merely an international service language. That is certainly the way France’s
shopkeepers treat it. It is increasingly difficult for foreigners to speak French, especially in Paris, unless they can
do it perfectly. No matter what national pride dictates in the classroom, waiters in restaurants and shop assistants
drop swiftly into a cutely accented English at the hint of an accent on the part of clients.
The idea that English is ‘merely’ a service language has as its counterpart the idea that mother tongues are languages
of cultural transmission. And it is here that, to upton-on-line’s mind, the French have a point of view that New Zealand
Maori would have little difficulty with. It was expressed in a recent article by Heinz Wismann and Pierre Judet de la
Combe in Le Figaro (18-19 November). They described ‘languages of culture’ as repositories of sense which have been laid
down over long histories. To learn such languages, they say, it is necessary to have mastered the culture of one’s own
maternal language.
One way for Europeans to do this, they point out, is to study Latin and Ancient Greek. That’s not just because some
European languages are directly descended from them. It’s because all European cultures and linguistic groups have
grappled with this inheritance and sought to translate it. So the classics become an independent point of cultural
reference from which to access other cultures.
A bit abstruse? Maybe. But upton-on-line (who himself did battle unsatisfactorily with both ancient languages) thinks
they have a point. That’s a cultural bridge available within Europe at least. Whether it is available to the descendants
of Europeans outside of Europe depends, on this reasoning, whether or not they’re speaking a ‘cultural’ or a service
version of their tongue. And here a bit of a worry must surely arise for English speaking New Zealanders. Because one
wonders whether – at least in schools – there is any cultural coherence to the English that is taught. As a marvellous
mixture of romance and northern European linguistic stocks, it should be fabulous source of cultural riches which Latin
and Greek could easily bring to the surface.
But if English is taken for granted as a ‘lucky’ inheritance in terms of ‘easy’ global communication, with no need to
delve into the cultural inheritance lurking within it, then these doors stay closed. A brave new world approach would
have it that English is all you need – and that in any case, because New Zealanders are half a world away from their
linguistic cultural roots, they don’t need to worry about them. But if you even half like the idea that to understand
other cultures you have to understand your own, then getting inside English and using Latin and Greek as reference
points becomes attractive.
Upton-on-line has previously wondered whether the eclectic “choose your module” approach to teaching young New
Zealanders about their history runs the risk (at least for Pakeha) of rearing an historically illiterate lost tribe. The
same sort of concern arising from a failure to take language seriously – including the root stocks of ‘cultural’ as
distinct from ‘service’ English - raises the prospect of a culturally lost tribe.
Trying to fashion a sense of nationhood out of the thin gruel of just 165 years of national history using a language
shorn of its cultural roots seems a brave project. Maori who are aware of the cultural embedded-ness of their own
language must sometimes wonder just who they’re dealing with.
Missing the links or the chain?
Established readers of upton-on-line may recall a less than ebullient review of a publication entitled Creating our
Future: sustainable development for New Zealand published by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (2002).
Two years have elapsed and we now have (September 2004) Missing Links: Connecting science with environmental policy from
the same source. It is a much more focused document aimed at a sub-species of Homo bureaucratensis called “environmental
policy makers”. Upton-on-line respectfully commends it to a wider audience.
This publication is not the place to attempt a full summary of the arguments some of which are not without contention.
But in a world in which an increasing number of interest groups – be they from industry or NGOs – work on the basis that
you choose your science to fit your argument, the PCE’s contribution is a welcome antidote. The report is authored by
Bruce Taylor, Wren Green and Hilary Phipps. They have covered difficult ground in a commendably accessible way which
should provide at the very least a reference point for debate.
Of particular value is the authors’ assertion that “policy makers run risks if they rely on occasional ‘snapshots’ of
the conventional wisdom within rapidly changing scientific disciplines.” This supports their conclusion that “science
needs to be able to integrate ‘the dynamics of change’ across broader scales of time and space and to also integrate
across disciplines.” When one considers the fact that New Zealand has only ever produced a single state of the
environment report in its entire history, the question arises of whether the report should have been entitled Finding
the rest of the chain.
The principal thrust of the report’s advocacy is the processes whereby scientific information informs decision-making.
Some will feel uncomfortable with the formulation that
science be produced in collaboration with a wide variety of stakeholders, in order to construct a body of knowledge
that will reflect the context of the decision, while continuing to maintain the rigor [sic] and accountability expected
of scientific research. The goal is to build common ground among competing beliefs and values through participatory,
democratic processes.
But given the audience for the report – policy makers caught up in political processes – it is hard to refute their
conclusion that deus ex machina pronouncements from science on complex issues shrouded inevitably in uncertainty will
make little impact. Deciding how to proceed in the face of uncertainty is the key question and the report is surely
right in proposing that “the disputing parties should agree on the agenda of questions to be answered before moving any
further into the technical process of devising the experiments” (here they are referring to large scale field
experiments as part of adaptive management processes).
Asking useful questions - questions that sceptics of all colours agree would be a useful way forward - is an obvious
stratagem. The fact that it doesn’t issue naturally from bureaucratic and regulatory processes says something about the
compartmentalised knowledge and agenda-protection that seems to have long been a characteristic of many political
decision-making systems.
It is also an essential approach given another phenomenon the report remarks upon – the paradox that “science has led to
an exponential increase in knowledge but at the same time contributed to our relative ignorance.” If that is a reality
for scientists constantly made aware of ever-increasing complexity as bounded certainties melt away, it applies with
nobs on in a media-driven lay community that has never been so superficially informed about so many things
simultaneously. Assuming that the questions are obvious and understood is one of the greatest errors policy makers can
make.
Upton-on-line wonders how many of the policy makers to whom the report is addressed will read it. (It would be
interesting to know how this could be objectively determined). In the meantime, it is to be hoped that a key audience
not mentioned by the report – the PCE’s own employers, i.e. Members of Parliament – will take the necessary hour or two
out of their busy schedules to read it. Any honest assessment of the legislative and regulatory disagreements into which
they ritually fall, would have to admit that little effort is often expended on defining the questions that would (if
answered) enable a consensus to emerge; and even less thought given to purchasing the time series data that, even if the
right questions were asked, could give better than snapshot answers.
ENDS