The Victoria Advocate | Foreign Students in La Grange

The Victoria Advocate put a local piece in today's paper about visiting students from Germany.

Some interesting commentarty:

"What surprised the German students was that America's reputation for free speech didn't extend to the classroom.

'I thought in America you can have more of your own opinion,' Feineb Hamdi said. 'We seem to have more freedom in Germany.'

...

Other students said school dress codes is another way U.S. students are denied freedom of expression."

That's right: more freedoms in Germany. Not to mention France. But now that fundamentalism has become so rampant here in France, the "no overt religious symbols in public schools" law has been passed in an attempt to keep public institutions secular. So in France you can wear a miniskirt to school but no headscarves, while in Texas you can't wear the miniskirt but the religious symbols are fine. Go figure.

A chilling sidebit in the Advocate:

The church activities in particular surprised the German students who explained that most of them rarely attend services other than for the major church holidays. And at least one admits to being essentially agnostic.

The way the Advocate tells it, it'd be fine for these "jungen" to be neo-nazis as long as they are "good Christians". Imagine that: an agnostic! Horror!

And of course it's also an interesting sign of the times that these students are from Germany whereas "La Grange" is named after the chateau of the famous Marquis de La Fayette, who also gave his name to "Fayette County". (But, of course, we just choose to ignore those french guys that helped out America way back when.)