A key priority for the Lycée Français de New York has long been what educators call “place-based education,” meaning learning that extends far beyond the literal and figurative walls of any given classroom and embraces the immediate surroundings in which a school finds itself. “Place-based education,” affirms the Center for Place-Based Education and Community Engagement, “immerses students in local heritage, cultures, landscapes, opportunities and experiences, using these as a foundation for the study of language arts, mathematics, social studies, science and other subjects across the
curriculum.” How extraordinary, therefore, that we who are associated with the LFNY are able to live in and to take advantage of New York, while at the same time inhabiting and drawing inspiration from a second astounding place: Paris, the City of Lights!
Indeed, through the remarkable efforts of its Director Pascale Richard, to whom we are all grateful, the Lycée Français de New York Cultural Center provides a phenomenal array of opportunities for our students, faculty, staff, parents, as well as our friends, neighbors and visitors, to experience the special vitality and universalism of French and Francophone culture, from the life of the mind to the arts of the stage, and beyond. Opening our doors to the city around us, Ms. Richard also reaches across the Atlantic Ocean to invite scientists, musicians, actors, journalists, artists and many others to our school, for the delight and edification of the LFNY community as a whole. Please click here to see our Cultural Center’s outstanding program for 2016-17 and do join us at an upcoming event if you are free.
Never has Paris and everything which this phenomenal city embodies been more alive and tangible on York Avenue than it was last Wednesday evening, when we had the honor of welcoming to the Lycée Français de New York a musical production that will be moving to Carnegie Hall next January, Piaf! The Show. 
Before a rapt audience of 360 students and adults, the uniquely talented French singer and actress Anne Carrère gave renditions of some 30 memorable songs from one of the world’s greatest singers, Edith Piaf, with a backdrop of stunning photographs of Paris during the 1940s, 1950s, when “la Môme” dazzled and moved people around the globe.
For some, especially our students, Piaf’s music was a wonderful discovery. They may have heard of her name and perhaps even the melody of a song like “Non, je ne regrette rien,” but they were often unaware of just how talented she was and even more so of how perfectly she personifies the ideas we associate with France. What ideas in particular, I asked one of our middle schoolers. Beauty, love, courage, freedom, came her answer. For
others, mainly the oldest in attendance, whose tears flowed freely during Carrère’s interpretation of L’hymne à l’amour, Piaf! The Show strengthened an already existing bond with France and everything French. A magical evening, reported one adult, adding: it immersed us in French culture as if we had been in Paris ourselves, strolling for the sake of strolling, discussing philosophy over coffee or debating politics on a bench by the Seine.
The work which Pascale Richard does, with the support of the LFNY Annual Fund for which we are immensely thankful, roots us in both New York and Paris. Yet perhaps what it does most significantly is to make our students citizens of not only two world capitals, but something which unites and at the same time transcends both: Culture, understood as a “body of artistic and intellectual work” through which “the values, customs, beliefs and symbolic practices by which men and women live” are conveyed and through a form of “secular grace” foster “a process of spiritual and intellectual development”** that allows us all to see “la vie en rose.”
*A song made famous by Edith Piaf, with lyrics by Jean Dréjac and music by Hubert Giraud (1954)
**Terry Eagleton, Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).
About the Author :
Sean Lynch was Head of School at the Lycée Français de New York from 2011 to 2018, after having spent 15 years at another French bilingual school outside of Paris: the Lycée International de St. Germain-en-Laye. Holding both French and American nationalities, educated in France (Sciences Po Paris) and the United States (Yale), and as the proud husband of a French-American spouse and father of two French-American daughters, Sean Lynch has spent his entire professional and personal life at the junction between the languages, cultures and educational systems of France and the United States. In addition to being passionate about education, he loves everything related to the mountains, particularly the Parc National du Mercantour.