A poster wrote, concerning the Sarkozy divorce:
“I wanted to check out the latest on the Sarkozy divorce and was
surprised that my google query turned up almost only sites in
English. One poll said that for 92% of French people, it made no
difference in their opinion. If you are interested, you can find some
video on the TF1 news site:
http://videos.tf1.fr/video/news/
You can also still view the French news from Oct 18 when the divorce
was announced. Comments by French politicians across the board
basically were that it has nothing to do with his public life and is
really nobody’s business.”
It would seem to me (from experience, actually) that some American students, if presented with the bald fact that the French don’t care about people’s sex lives i.e. who they marry, who they divorce, who they date, who they do “it” with, and so on, would take away from that that the French don’t care about important things.
And if a teacher were to try to present the French perspective, he would per force have to contrast that with the American perspective. Once contrast appears, students would face the opportunity to decide that one perspective is more mature than the other and that might lead to unacceptable notions of what’s important, i.e. it might contravene American values.
Perhaps this is why we stick to foods, fiestas and costumes.