6 thoughts on “France increases science spending in preparation for election year”
Crazy French, spending money on science and research. BTW, today's NYT has an article about national identity issues in French education, with the conservatards wanting to teach that everything that France ever did was great, from the arrival of Julius Caesar on, and the liberals wanting something something, who cares, they hate France.
Interesting! Thanks for the find. Good God, conservatives are delicate little flowers. Heaven forbid teachers share some unflattering truths with their precious offspring.
The French wingnuts live in envy of Texas homeschool textbooks.
National identity in school is a touchy topic. La signora_Quarantanova has liberal attitudes about many things, and I've even convinced her that bullfighting is barbaric animal abuse that degrades the people who watch it. But she will not let go of her belief that Muslim migrants in Italy have no right to demand that the crucifixes in every Italian public school classroom should be removed.
Similarly, I was having a discussion with my weekly English/French coffee group this morning about immigration and integration, in our case specifically around how much the French should expect/insist on Islamic immigrants adopting into the French culture. My group is pretty liberal, and yet they all believe that it's acceptable to expect some shift to a more western attitude, particularly where the treatment of women is concerned. It's a tricky subject.
And I can't say I disagree with your Missus. I think it's ok to expect that newcomers to a culture need to adopt to *some* of the aspects of their new homes. It's a pick-your-battles situation, where you can respect the people that already live there while maintaining those things from your old homeland that you value. Otherwise I would insist that all of these silly French people speak English and keep stores open on Sudays like I want.
Italians who come here feel obligated to lecture Americans on how what we call "pizza" is totally inauthentic. They love to eat Domino's pizza but must at the same time decry it as the thin end of the wedge, ha-ha, of cultural genocide. And they would no more eat pizza with their bare hands than they would prepare a drink in a glass filled up with ice.
Which of course is because their public works are so unreliable that they never have any ice. In the little town near where the family cascina resides, the only available Internet comes via DSL, which would be tolerable if the rats didn't periodically chew through the wire.
My public school tried to break me, but I wouldn't be broken. I was schlepped off to one of sweet old Alma White's Academies for a couple of years, and they somehow embraced the sinister…
Crazy French, spending money on science and research. BTW, today's NYT has an article about national identity issues in French education, with the conservatards wanting to teach that everything that France ever did was great, from the arrival of Julius Caesar on, and the liberals wanting something something, who cares, they hate France.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/28/arts/joan-of-ar…
Interesting! Thanks for the find. Good God, conservatives are delicate little flowers. Heaven forbid teachers share some unflattering truths with their precious offspring.
The French wingnuts live in envy of Texas homeschool textbooks.
National identity in school is a touchy topic. La signora_Quarantanova has liberal attitudes about many things, and I've even convinced her that bullfighting is barbaric animal abuse that degrades the people who watch it. But she will not let go of her belief that Muslim migrants in Italy have no right to demand that the crucifixes in every Italian public school classroom should be removed.
Similarly, I was having a discussion with my weekly English/French coffee group this morning about immigration and integration, in our case specifically around how much the French should expect/insist on Islamic immigrants adopting into the French culture. My group is pretty liberal, and yet they all believe that it's acceptable to expect some shift to a more western attitude, particularly where the treatment of women is concerned. It's a tricky subject.
And I can't say I disagree with your Missus. I think it's ok to expect that newcomers to a culture need to adopt to *some* of the aspects of their new homes. It's a pick-your-battles situation, where you can respect the people that already live there while maintaining those things from your old homeland that you value. Otherwise I would insist that all of these silly French people speak English and keep stores open on Sudays like I want.
Italians who come here feel obligated to lecture Americans on how what we call "pizza" is totally inauthentic. They love to eat Domino's pizza but must at the same time decry it as the thin end of the wedge, ha-ha, of cultural genocide. And they would no more eat pizza with their bare hands than they would prepare a drink in a glass filled up with ice.
Which of course is because their public works are so unreliable that they never have any ice. In the little town near where the family cascina resides, the only available Internet comes via DSL, which would be tolerable if the rats didn't periodically chew through the wire.
My public school tried to break me, but I wouldn't be broken. I was schlepped off to one of sweet old Alma White's Academies for a couple of years, and they somehow embraced the sinister…