american history

Every Thursday, I go to a junior high and high school just over the eastern edge of Paris, in the banlieue, to work as an English-teaching assistant to a professor there. I sit in on one class of sixieme (equivalent to American fifth or sixth grade, there's an age difference thing going on here that i haven't exactly worked out) and one class of terminale (last year of high school, but they're one year younger than Americans in their last year of high school). Well, I used to go -- today was my last day. I have a lot of complaints about it -- mostly having to do with the French educational system, which is nothing if not rigid and conformist -- but I don't particularly feel like going there. I just wanted to note something that happened today in the terminale class.

They're studying the American civil rights movement; segregation, Rosa Parks, the Ku Klux Klan, Martin Luther King and his "I have a dream" speech. Today they were looking at the text of that speech, and the teacher was trying to direct them to talk about the Pilgrims and how they came to North America looking for religious freedom (so she could segue from that into the religious aspects of the speech, and mentions of freedom, separately and together). She kept asking: Who founded America? Who were the first people to America? (Let's ignore mentions of, say, Jamestown, right now, and skip right to the Mayflower.)

No one was answering. The teacher was getting frustrated. Who founded America? Who were the first people? Come on, who founded America?

Some boy in the front row said, as if it had come to him in a flash of insight -- "Henry Ford!"

I laughed and the teacher smirked a little. The kid tried again: "Rockefeller?"

"Pilgrims" came eventually, but it took a while.