As we huddled on the street, waiting to be let in the school for a meeting with new families, I found several parents from my daughter Ella’s class chatting about how difficult their children’s workload is and how public the humiliation is if they don’t do well. For instance, each day the children have to recite a French sentence they learned the day before. When each child is finished, the teacher grades him or her aloud: tres bien (very good), bon (good), ca va (OK), or horrible. I don’t tell them that Ella doesn’t complain, that instead, she’s grateful to be challenged. (It would sound unsympathetic.) She is not the best French speaker in the class. Some children speak perfectly but just need to work on their writing. “I love being average!” she said, the other day, which made me laugh. “School is designed for the kids in the middle,” she explained, “and for once I’m the target audience.”
Leave it to me, American provocateur that I am, to steer the conversation from homework to sex. “Did your kids tell you about the movie?” I asked. They hadn’t. I said Ella was excited to tell me yesterday that the teacher had shown a movie with naked children in it and that they could see their “private parts.” The teacher had explained, matter-of-factly: “That’s the way the French do it.”
Every Monday the class watches a little movie, then they use it as a springboard for vocabulary, spelling, and acting out scenes. This week the movie was “Bath Time.”
“Maybe it’s only in America that teachers wouldn’t show a scene like that,” I said to two mothers, one Dutch, one British. The Dutch mother shrugged her shoulders. I thought of Amsterdam’s legal prostitution and wondered if anything shocked her kids. The British mother said, “They wouldn’t show that kind of movie in England because of recent scandals with priests and coaches.”
Today the children will choose roles, and on Friday they will act out the scene. I wonder if it will be in authentic (un)dress! At the end, I hope the teacher says “tres bien.”
Perhaps we American/British are the odd ones out; blame it all on the Puritans! But no, strict religionists of all kinds share a deep concern about the body and all its manifestations. Does nudity lead to “bad things”? Not necessarily, but warping the mind to consider the body shameful very likely does. And consider that every culture has always covered certain parts of the bodies after adolescence – see Amazonian natives, for example. Why? Keep us posted on what happens next!
Yes, Tricia, it’s all culturally relative. It’s interesting to be in a place that keeps reminding me of that fact.