Then One Day They Discovered that THEY were "the Other"

The main teaching union in France has criticised the education minister's plans to offer free English classes in the school holidays next year.

You can always tell something has become a cult when it their actions are decisively made despite what benefit it will take away from its’ adherents. In that spirit we see the bificated nature of the French view of its’ own culture: both obsessed with its failure, and motivated by a need to mark its own supremacy.

Xavier Darcos announced the plans on Monday, insisting that speaking fluent English was the key to success.

The Snes-FSU union leader Roland Hubert said Mr Darcos should be concentrating on what happens during school time.

The policy marks a real break from the traditional Gallic strategy of promoting the French language.

Two years ago, the then President, Jacques Chirac, famously stormed out of an EU summit when a fellow Frenchman began making his speech in English.

In other words, these "internationalists" would reject out of spite the language most broadly used now in diplomacy and international cultural exchange, the arts, and business.

All the while we're sure to receive lectures on others' provinciality, hear these arguments as to why one should learn Mandarin and Arabic that the rest of the world of business, especially the private sectors of French business have known for decades, that is, without having been lauded in poem and song by a narrow enducational establishment. The worst part is the air in which it's dispensed - that of speaking in the thrid person of other cultures no differently than when it was concidered enlightened to call the hard working "noble savages".