A friend gave us a complete set of a 1960s edition of Lagarde & Michard, the textbooks of French literature that have been standard in French secondary schools for more than half a century. Almost every French teenager is brought up on these books, which expose the students to the best of French literature through copious extracts and just enough introductory material to make the literary works not just understandable but also delightful. There are six volumes, one each for the Middle Ages and the fifteenth through twentieth centuries. They are gorgeous books, illustrated with art of the appropriate period, but mostly devoted to text, with the avowed object of making the students fall in love with everything glorious about French letters.

Just glancing through the introduction to the first volume, and then leafing through the pages, left Dr. Boli with the impression that these are incomparably better than any school literature textbook he has seen in America since the days of McGuffey’s Readers. The selections are both excellent and representative; the introductions are intelligent and show a positive genius for reducing complex ideas to a form that even a bored secondary-school student can absorb; the illustrations are beautiful and illustrative of currents of thought in each era, rather than pictures just thrown in with the hope that students will not be frightened by the sight of all those words.

If these books make up the standard literary education of French teenagers, then we can only conclude that the French as a whole are far better educated in literature than Americans ever have been or have any hope of being in the future.

And are the French better people than the Americans? No; they are no worse and no better; they are just about the same. They betray their most cherished principles at every opportunity. They constantly teeter on the brink of extremism in one direction or another, and are pulled back from the edge by lucky coincidences that we may choose to call Providence until Providence gets sick of them and decides to let them plummet. They pick incomprehensible quarrels. They close their minds to obvious truths. In short, they are just like us in every important way, and just like every other branch of the human race.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that no improvement in education, no exposure of young minds to the noblest thoughts of our species, no reform of our schools at all can ever make better people and better citizens; that mediocrity can produce only mediocrity, but that excellence produces mediocrity just as reliably.

This is how pessimism takes root in the mind of a literary man.