I once heard American author William Faulkner speak to a small gathering of French students, teachers and college people. After the talk, someone asked Faulkner if American students think. It seems a curious question, but a decade after World War II, France was still recovering from defeat and the German occupation, and had a sort of national inferiority complex, and consoled itself with the idea that although America was more powerful, France represented a superior intellectual culture: They were Greeks to our Romans.
Faulkner answered by saying that thought, in an American youngster, was a product like sweat: It occurred under stress and was not normally called forth. The talk moderator was appalled and tried to walk back Faulkner's reply, but Faulkner stuck to his position, and the audience went on to other questions. Of course Americans think, I told myself, every day, on the job, problem-solving, figuring out how to make more money for the firm.
However, the lectures and bull sessions of college are a distant memory; maybe philosophical thinking was what the questioner meant? Napoleon saw the problem when in the early 1800s he established the public high school (lycée) system: All French secondary students — academic and vocational — are required to take a course in philosophy in which they are expected to write answers to questions like the following: ■ Can a scientific truth be dangerous? ■ Is it one's own responsibility to find happiness? ■ Is observ.