“While there is no doubt that wheeled luggage can, at its best, combine ergonomic comfort with the primal pleasure of manoeuvring a heavy vehicle, when used by children to carry their school things it is an unmistakeable sign of both physical and spiritual weakness. The first united Europe was built by Roman legionaries who carried thirty kilograms of gear on their backs. Watching their young successors wheeling their textbooks – already deracinated by Brussels overlords – behind them, one is made painfully yet unavoidably aware of the moral decay which is destroying relativistic Europe from within.” – Mark Coldhill, Europe, ‘Human Rights’ and the Tides of Dusk, pp.81-2.
When I was in Grades 7 and 8, a classmate of mine – one of the few who commuted in my direction – had a backpack that transformed into a miniature rolling suitcase. The sight of him struggling to bump and drag his pack up the subway stairs before towing it off to school seemed, at the time, both darkly emblematic and silly: at one and the same time he appeared as a martyr to modernity’s stresses – the schoolchild transformed by the weight of educational drudgery into a grotesque prefiguration of the harried business traveller – and as a ridiculous oddity – the awkward kid who was, to put it simply, pulling his backpack behind him on wheels.
Across a decade and the pond, however, children with rolling backpacks are no longer rarae aves. Every one of my charges has a cartable on wheels. At 4:30 every day a file of children burst through the doors of École Rex and trundle their belongings across the schoolyard to where their parents and grandparents are waiting at the gates and looking uncannily like the crowd of relatives and chauffeurs who cluster around the arrival gates of international airports. All through the afternoon rush-hour in Bellovacum children can be seen in harness. They stand patiently, preternaturally matured by their pink and orange carry-on luggage, while their mothers borrow books at the library where I go to read the newspaper; they trail exhaustedly behind parents and older siblings down the Boulevard du Général de Gaulle; and, as dusk falls, they roll across the Thérain with wheels illuminated by red and blue LEDs.
While small French children may be highly adept at handling kindergarten rolling stock, they are less skilled at assessing linguistic competence. In particular, they seem to have trouble reconciling the empirical fact that I can, in a manner of speaking, communicate in French and their a priori assumption that as both a foreigner and an English teacher I must surely speak only English. Thus students with whom I have conversed in French, and who have evidently understood me and been understood by me still ask their teachers, “Maître, est-ce que Léon parle français?” Like Renaissance devotees of Aristotle and Galen, they are prepared to ignore or reject their own observations of the world. When asked – in French – whether I speak French, I generally answer – in French – that I don’t, before proceeding – also in French – to explain our next activity. Everyone seems satisfied by this response.
