Word: baccalaureate
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...often rigid emphasis on formal, elitist-oriented training. Accordingly the new school offered such courses as History of Cinema, Sexology, and Third World Economics and Politics, shocking to conservative French educators. Most revolutionary of all, Vincennes, alone among French universities, dispensed with the usual entrance requirement, the dread "bac" (baccalauréat degree), more or less the equivalent of two years of U.S. college. By admitting non-bacs and having a fluid schedule, Vincennes intended to allow workers with full-time jobs to attend the university...
Jammed into giant halls, 273,000 French teen-agers sweated through the notorious 13-to 18-hr. tortures of oral and written baccalauréat exams last week. They seemed docile enough. After all, their careers, future incomes and their very status in French society were at stake. But below the surface their mood was likely to be very different. In the past five months, tens of thousands of lycee (secondary school) students have rebelled at hundreds of the 2,258 state-run schools, occupying buildings, staging hunger strikes and fighting police...
French schoolchildren, who have long quaked at their formidable baccalauréat exam, last week were faced with an even worse fate-no exams. Demanding an $80 million raise, France's 325,000 teachers threatened to suspend next summer's bachots. For 180,000 lycee students, no bachot meant no entrance to universities, no draft deferment-and, for men, a possible call to Algeria...
...since the days of Napoleon has France changed its fundamental educational goals. The secondary schools are still so rigidly academic that only about one in every four children gets into them. Those who do must face the dreaded baccalauréat (bachot) exam to graduate. Many must memorize stacks of Greek and Latin verbs, know how to translate Seneca and Tacitus, analyze (in English) the works of De Quincey, Ruskin and George Eliot, be familiar with everything from the Pensées of Pascal to the characters of Corneille...
...also suggested that all current examinations, including the bachot, be abolished. With that, the Paris press erupted. Former Education Minister André Marie declared that despite its "injustices," the bachot should stay. Onetime Boxing Champion Georges Carpentier bluntly announced: "I am against the baccalauréat." Actor Jean-Louis Barrault said, "I adore it," but Actor Sacha Guitry, who spent six terms in one form, snorted: "Tellme, what good would the bachot have done Rodin...
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