NOW I don’t know about you, but although I yield to no one in my love and veneration of, say, Mont Orgueil when seen at dusk from the bar of the Castle Green, I have to confess that there are limits to my interest in much of the smaller print of history.

Maybe it’s a hangover from my schooldays, when the otherwise admirable teachers at Hautlieu in the Sixties would bang on ad nauseam about the Corn Laws or the Act of Supremacy (1534) until I and the other no-hopers in the back row were hyperventilating with boredom.

They consistently and wilfully sidestepped all the interesting bits, like the fact that our V sign – the Harvey Smith version, not Churchill’s – probably dates back to Agincourt.

Yes, it was apparently the gesture our fine archers used before the battle to warn France’s best bowmen that those two fingers would be cut off if ever they were unlucky enough to fall into our fine hands, and then you’ll have drawn your last string, mon ami, if not your last breath.

Mind you, the French have suffered in much the same way. They can all quote you the Count of Auteroche who, when confronted by Lord Hay and our brave lads at the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745, sportingly cried: ‘Messieurs les Anglais, please shoot first.’

Oui, French chivalry at its finest, n’est-ce pas? No wonder the whole world loves, admires and envies us for our Frenchitude.

But there are at least three impertinent objections here that teachers tend to forget or ignore in the patriotic heat of the moment.

First of all, some historians think the count did indeed say those very words, but that he was actually facing the other way at the time, speaking to his own troops, and that an additional comma has got lost in the mists of time and legend. So it should really be, ‘Messieurs, les Anglais, please shoot first’ (or we’re food for the crows).

A second school of thought argues that, no, he has been correctly reported but it was really a tactical gambit masquerading as aristocratic courtesy.

In wars fought with musket and shot, it took for ever and a day to reload, and the English could then be picked off like rabbits while they were fretting and fumbling over their powder and ball.

Whichever version is right, what nobody seriously contests (and the textbooks fail to dwell on, if they mention it at all) is that by inviting the English to open hostilities, old Auteroche stuck his finger in his eye big time, as they say here.

Because the Brits have never been shrinking violets when it comes to matters martial, of course, so you lot duly let fly, blasting away his entire front rank and even holing the noble count himself in no fewer than seven places, even if he did survive to tell the tale. Not that he’d especially want to, of course.

Mind you, history, flawed or not, is probably the least of the pupils’ worries here. In a recent book, Peter Gumbel, once a special correspondent for Time Magazine and now professor of journalism at the élite Institut des Sciences Politiques in Paris and father of two teenage daughters himself, is equally withering about French education generally.

He pleads for a better understanding of pupils as children, and also an end to the tyranny of the marking system and the humiliations it inflicts on kids.

Yes, by the time they reach 18, an incredible six out of ten of them have been ordered to repeat at least one year in their school lives after poor results, the victims of an institution that knocks them down more than it builds them up.

When I tell my own classes here in Dinan that it’s well nigh unheard of to repeat a year in the UK, the reaction is always one of wide-eyed, slack-jawed disbelief as they struggle to get their minds round the almost inconceivable humanity of the idea.

Yet 130,000 youngsters still leave school every year without the slightest diploma, certificate or formal qualification.

In a recent survey of the 15-year-olds in the 31 OECD countries, more than half the French kids said their teachers helped them individually ‘sometimes’ or ‘never’ compared to the survey average of 60% who said that they got personal assistance ‘at every lesson or most of them’.

Not that Gumbel blames the teachers themselves. No, they too are the victims of a culture of excellence that places subject knowledge way ahead of teaching training.

When I sat my teaching exams here after they had refused to accept my British nationality and my B.Ed (Hons) as proof that I knew enough English to teach it as a foreign language to French teenagers, one of the papers was a seven-hour slog on ‘duality in Hamlet’.

Even primary school teachers have to have at least an MA or an MSc. And when you see the reading syllabus imposed on seven-year-olds, for example, you begin to understand why. Among other things, it asks pupils to identify and analyse the use of periphrasis, onomastics, meiosis and asyndeton in excerpts from various literary works.

No wonder nearly a third of the kids arriving in first-year secondary school have difficulties with the three Rs to the point of being functionally illiterate or innumerate, or both.

And Lord help any teacher who shows any initiative. In 1985 my head asked me to set up an all-singing, all-dancing Section Anglophile to fast-track the students’ English. Word of it soon reached the inspector’s royal ear on ‘le téléphone arabe’ (the bush telegraph) and I was inspected and he conceded that the kids, the parents, the staff and even he himself all thought it was great, really good. Félicitations, Monsieur!

Then he ordered me to scrap the lot toot sweet, and the tooter the sweeter, because the official syllabus didn’t tolerate innovation, however successful.
Not that I’m any kind of genius (if you or I did think that, Mme Masstairmann would soon put us straight), but I did have a solid teacher training in Portsmouth and I had just adopted a less theoretical, more hands-on English-style approach.

Fortunately, the boss said to carry on regardless, we’ll just camouflage it in our official reports, and we prosper to this day.

The cherry on French education’s cake, is that the government has just closed down all the post-grad teacher training colleges and courses. If you know your subject, you can teach it, is now once more the official line. So 17,000 new teachers started their careers this September having had no preparation whatsoever.

Well, they had to do something soon, because half the teachers who retired in July haven’t been replaced and 50,000 posts have been axed in the last five years. In fact, the situation is so bad that one Dinan school is currently advertising at the local job centre for a maths graduate after one of their profs was signed off sick for a month and the education office couldn’t find a stand-in.

Actually, I’ve been trying to shore up one new colleague who’s taking a mauling every time he climbs into the ring with our Year 9Bs. So when he came out of his latest lesson saying they hadn’t peeped a single word, not one, I was about to congratulate him. But he explained that the rotten whatsits had all just sat there staring at him in total silence the whole time. No, nothing he said or did had got any reaction whatsoever.

Oh well, it’s the first 40 years at the chalk-face that are the hardest, eh? And I rather fear his next 40 minutes won’t be great, either.
Kenavo!