Mon&ecirc;tier, France

Every spring, all parents in France with children aged 3 to 18 (as far as I can tell, without exception) jump on an Alps-bound bullet train. Upon arrival at the chalet, they stick their little loved ones in ski school. We're not talking about fooling around on the bunny slopes for a few hours. It has to be l'&Eacute;cole du Ski Fran&ccedil;ais, or ESF.

Friends outside the Gallic hexagon may wonder why I don't buck the ski herd of an adopted, vacation-drunk country for a nice Maldivian beach. Those so-called friends are clearly not responsible for kids in France, who are released from school every two months for two weeks. If they were, they'd be grateful that for winter break they don't have to be creative about anything except -- per queries from mothers of their kids' Parisian friends -- "Which resort are you going to this year?"

Our Franco-American family made its maiden voyage, soon after the oldest child's fourth birthday last year, to Chambrousse, a resort near Grenoble. We signed our daughter up in advance with Jean-Jacques, the ESF's master of the Piou-Piou (translation: little bird) program for small children. How excited she was. His name, which came up almost nightly in the anticipatory weeks before, took on a mythic status. For us too. We were told that la m&eacute;thode de Jean-Jacques was renowned for making kids into skiers.

On the day of the first lesson, the snow is falling heavily. The legend in the flesh turns out to be a shortish middle-aged man with a bushy mustache. "Time for you to go," Jean-Jacques tells us quickly. "We have our methods." An anxious, abandoned little girl in a green-and-yellow suit is put in a long line with some two-dozen other debutantes. Not a few minutes later, ours makes a tentative move and, as any good beginner would, falls down. Then she lies there a few long minutes until one of the instructors for this overcrowded class picks her up. By that point, she's bawling. Jean-Jacques walks over and says: "Shut up! Move!" He gives a shove that lands the child, my child, face down in the snow.

Here, while the father standing half a football field away explodes in a white rage of somewhat incoherent French expletives, we should pause to consider the roots of the Jean-Jacques educational philosophy. His "method" isn't unique to him or ESF. It's how French public schools are run. Holiday or not, learning in the French tradition is not supposed to be fun. The teacher is not your friend. You don't come away with fuzzy warm feelings about a well-spent youth. You have, instead, calculus or Moli&egrave;re or parallel skiing beaten into you.

Good organization, discipline, a rigid hierarchy and imperiousness are the hallmarks of any self-respecting French institution. And the French ski school is a national institution that for a couple of weeks a year plays surrogate for the public school system. As in the schools, the ESF curriculum is standardized. Any day, on any slope, thousands of instructors decked out in ESF red run packs of kids through precisely the same turns, depending on age. In another French etatist touch, ESF enjoys a virtual monopoly. It's the world's biggest ski school -- training 1.8 million pupils in oversubscribed classes and administering 800,000 tests every year. As for the hierarchy, the (unionized, naturally) instructors are ranked by seniority; older ski bums, and we're talking about men and women well into their sunset years, get first pick of classes, tending to leave their juniors stuck with tots.

The approach to customer service is equally steeped in national tradition. Confronted, Jean-Jacques had no patience for our protests about his rough touch. A younger instructor rolled her eyes in sympathy but wasn't about to speak up to the big boss. Nor was an apology forthcoming, which wasn't surprising. As far as memory serves, I've never in five years in France received one from a waiter, store clerk or anyone else in a service profession. We took a different tack. Our daughter so looked forward to this first ski lesson, we said. We heard so many good things about him, and so on. You have to flatter French authority figures, even (or especially) if you happen to be paying them. The old goat agreed not to shove our child into the snow again.

By the end of that week, she got her cute Piou-Piou medal without any visible trauma. She never, however, mentioned Jean-Jacques again. My wife, a veteran of French public education, came away from the experience strengthened in her resolve to keep our son and daughter on the private track as long as we stay here.

And in ski schools, it turns out, France also offers a choice. This year, at Serre Chevalier, we came across a rebellious (another side of the French character) establishment called ESI, or &Eacute;cole du Ski Internationale. These upstarts made a sales pitch tuned to our anti-ESF prejudices, promising "human class size," "conviviality" and "a warm welcome." Liberated from the memory of Jean-Jacques, our now 5-year-old focused her affections on her new teacher, Denis. He was one of six ESI guys, compared with some 80 employed by giant ESF in this little village alone.

ESF need not worry. Old ways pass slowly in this conservative country. The traditional approach has much to recommend it, too. France is full of good, solid skiers. And thanks to their regimented educational system, the French are spared the Anglo-American disease of excessive nostalgia for happy and carefree school years. Adulthood is liberating, and not just on the slopes.


Write to Matthew Kaminski at