In French universities, the primary mode of evaluation is the exposé, a ten- to thirty-minute presentation on a topic relating to the course. While American social science and humanities courses are writing intensive, grading students based on the quality of their essays and research papers, French courses are almost exclusively oral. The professor’s lecture is often squeezed into the time left over after a student’s exposé.
Exposés are difficult to get the hang of at first. American students will be tempted to advance a thesis and to defend it logic and careful research. But nothing will alienate a French professor more than this argumentative approach. The exposé begins with a short introduction before presenting the problematique—the central paradox or question at hand. It then follows a very strict formula of yes, no, maybe. That is, part one will make the case for one answer to or understanding of the question, and part two will invariably take the opposing view. Finally, there will be a conclusion, which is almost always something to the effect of: “One the one hand this, on the other hand that, but, really, who knows?” Students follow this formula like scripture.
My first week I was given the following question: is war natural? If I were in the US, I would have begun with a thesis (yes, indeed, war is natural) before making three points to back up my assertion (first, we are evolutionarily hard-wired for conflict, second…etc.). But, for the French, certainty is anathema to a good exposé. Instead, I began by defining war and then moved on to what it means for something to be natural. After a good deal of wrangling (Are we talking about man in the state of nature? Or simply what humans are predisposed to in the modern age?) I moved to part one, where I argued the affirmative, bouncing like a pinball from contract theory to evolutionary biology to history to literature. In the second part, I argued the negative, tossing around this writer and that. Naturally, no consensus emerged. I ended with no clearer an answer than when I had begun. I was forced to conclude that it was impossible to answer the question definitively, and that it really depended on your definitions and how you felt about Hobbes and Rousseau and this and that. Is war natural? Who knows?
The professor seemed satisfied with this response.
I can think of two explanations for this unfamiliar way of approaching the course material. The first is that, unlike the American system, the French system emphasizes ambiguity. Relishes it. In the real world, after all, there are no easy answers, and what seems obvious to one person may strike another as misguided. This kind of philosophy—that truth itself is dynamic and subjective—is distinctly un-American. In the US, the worlds of academia and policy-making both rest on the assumption that there is an optimal answer, that the truth is knowable, and that we should strive toward it, even if we know we will fall short. French educators, on the other hand, would likely identify with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quip that “the sign of a first rate intellect is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind and retain the ability to function.”
The second explanation for the French aversion to argumentation was voiced by my fourteen year-old host brother at the dinner table. “Professors,” he said, “think you’re too young and naïve to have an opinion.”
Who knows?
