Oral Surgery

France's grueling baccalaureate exam, the pre-university hurdle founded by Napoleon 151 years ago, has been a nightmare for secondary-school students ever since. The "bachot"' is a double headache: up to three days of stiff written exams, one appalling day of ten successive 10-minute oral exams by ten gimlet-eyed professors. Those who fail in June (65%) get another chance in September; those who fail then (80%) stay at school another year. Notable first-round failures: Anatole France, Alphonse Daudet, Andre Gide, Franchise Sagan. Though some brave bachot bumblers repeat the year as many as six times, others (like Gide) bid adieu to formal education forever. One result: only 409 French youths per 100,000 population attend college, as compared to 1,950 in the U.S.--an alarming statistic in a classical-bent France yearning for scientific and technological power.

Last week France produced a startling reform: no more oral exams. Had Education Minister Andre Boulloche abolished schools he could not have provoked more happy whoops and shocked wails.

Sorbonne Philosophy Professor Jean Guitton rushed to the front page of Le Figaro to cry shame, because "the oral, properly understood, is a delicious moment." Guitton fondly recalled questions from his own orals ("Monsieur, what was the color of pigs in Homer's day?"), remembered his anti-French error of telling his examiners that brainy men complement each other ("No, Monsieur. When intelligences are united, they subtract from each other"). Warmly supporting Guitton in defense of the oral. Author Paul ( The Innocent Tenant) Guth wrote: "In a world more and more dedicated to the quantitative, the oral is the unique safeguard of the qualitative." It allows boys and girls "to show their true nature . . . the whole personality ... A man who does not know how to talk today is devalued by 20%."

But others cheered the second French Revolution. Wrote famed Intellectual Andre Maurois: "It's a good thing to suppress the orals, which are fatal for the timid. An individual can express himself fully in writing, give a survey of his true value on an exam paper, but be incapable of developing his ideas aloud." Added Author Jean Dutourd: "The reform pleases me, for it seems to be a step toward the suppression--pure and simple--of this entire monstrous examination."

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