My job as a chronicler of the special life our students lead at the Lycée Français de New York has been both unusually complicated and unusually simple this week; complicated because the list of inspirational happenings from which I might draw for this weekly blog is longer than ever, but simple because so many of our students have been asking and talking about one subject only over the last few days: the US presidential election. Of course, they have been following, studying and in certain cases even participating in the electoral process for months, seizing every opportunity to bring our curriculum alive with reference to the world around us, and engaging too with the issues at hand through co-curricular activities that develop the sense of civic duty, social responsibility and global solidarity which lies at the heart of our mission.
The questions our students have been posing, and not just since Tuesday, have been characteristically incisive and compassionate. Among those I have heard, from a range of middle and high schoolers: why does the electoral college count more than the popular vote? Why does it matter who appoints justices to the Supreme Court? What motivated people to vote for the candidate they did? Why were the polls so wrong about the outcome? Will it now be harder for foreigners to live and work in the US than before? What is free trade and is it finished? Why was there so little discussion of climate change during the election and will the Paris Agreement be upheld? What will the new presidency mean for LGBT rights and gender equality and the battle against racism, all of which matter to us at the LFNY? Will there be changes in US foreign policy? Motivated perhaps by the wonderful German exchange students we hosted last week: when will the United States join Germany in resolving the refugee crisis? And, expressed in a multiplicity of ways: the LFNY is so inclusive; what can we do to advocate for inclusion beyond our own community?
These are essential questions and it is our vocation as educators to help our students to address them, to the extent possible on their own, in ways appropriate to their levels of maturity, and always supported by the skills of critical inquiry, thinking and argumentation that are integral elements of our educational program. At the same time, we also believe at the LFNY in the importance of values and furthermore in the translation of those values into a framework through which we can approach learning, interaction with one another, and participation in society at large. What values in particular? For us, these values are clear, as was evident in the survey of values we conducted with our families, faculty, staff and secondary-school students last spring. Verbatim, here is what the members of the Lycée Français de New York Mission Committee, tasked with renewing our Mission Statement for January 2017, placed at the top of their report on values at a meeting of our 260-strong personnel a fortnight ago: openness, tolerance, respect and humanism.
Of what use might such values be to our students as they endeavor to understand our times, to embrace the future with optimism, and to make the “the world [at least] a bit better, whether by/a healthy child, a garden patch/or a redeemed social condition,” as the 19th Century American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson once exhorted? Out of deference for your time, please let me take just one of the aforementioned values and share with you just one thought, quoting this time from a 21st Century American writer, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot. The value in question, which is also the title of an extraordinary book she has published: respect. For Lawrence-Lightfoot, respect in its highest form does not refer to “some sort of debt due people because of their attained or inherited position, their age, gender, class, race, professional status…” Rather, it is a certain kind of relationship we have with others, one that is based on “symmetry, empathy and connection…among equals.”* It is through the lens of respect understood in these terms that we should be assessing all behavior, our own as well as that of others, public figures included. It is in relation to this definition of respect that we should be holding ourselves and each other accountable, beginning with people aspiring to or assuming positions of political leadership which have an impact on the common good. It is anchored in this form of respect that we should always be acting as citizens, standing up for what we believe to be right, as you will soon see our students doing in a special post-electoral edition of the LFNY newspaper, Le Lynx.
*Respect (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus Books, 2000), pp. 9-10.
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.