Are Irish attitudes being unduly negative? Not really, exposure to lifestyle differences can be a real eye-opener, French teacher Mary O'Sullivan tells Kathy Sheridan
As a parent and teacher she has led every kind of student exchange, at professional and personal levels. She can trump any story, and agrees the traditional exchange route is dying because of changing family structures.
Significantly, Mary O'Sullivan's passion for cultural exchanges remains undiminished: "As adults, those children will never be afraid of going abroad, because they will remember that they trod the roads in a country where they didn't speak the language."
For some years, Villiers ran a teacher-led exchange with a French school which entailed a week at school and a week en famille. For students, the cultural differences were an eye-opener. Schooldays started at 8 a.m. and formality ruled an education system where no questions were permitted in class.
With host families, they experienced formal, slow-cooked meals at immutable meal times and early bed-times.
In between, they discovered a decent, working national transport system, and how a nation could survive without a fast-food culture or a binge-drinking culture or a pub for every dozen citizens - and how that affected the money your average French teenager considered necessary for a day or night on the town and why he or she might seem dismayingly reluctant to part with it once abroad.
Money is a recurring issue. Irish students used to seeing their families planning and spending considerable sums to keep the foreign student happy are often bemused to discover the favour is not returned once they are the guests. One student was asked to stump up her share of the parking charges - €1 - on a city outing and as well as pay for her own ice cream, while Papa was paying for the children.
They also got a keen sense of how families in another culture relate to each other and usually returned with a keen appreciation of their own home and school life. But what about language?
"That won't happen in a fortnight. For a successful language course, a student would need to enrol for three weeks at least, if not for a term," she says.
French schools will accept children from other EU countries for anything from a term to a year. But she treads warily when asked how parents can arrange such a programme. Villiers stopped its exchange programme some years ago because matching families was sometimes a problem, and often parents prefer a more structured programme.
Agencies, clearly, may have even deeper problems. For this writer, whose 17-year-old daughter travelled through a well-known and expensive agency, the stories from some of the "carefully selected" host families were hair-raising.
"We would always be pleased to hear that someone like a grandmother was involved," says O'Sullivan, "so there would always be someone in the house. And you do need personal contact.
"To send a 15-year-old into a foreign country without a personal contact is something that I as a mother would not do. It is very, very important that you know the families on the ground."
She found her own solution after a three-month stint on a teacher exchange programme in a south-eastern French village. Out of that emerged a network of teachers and families known to her personally. It's the way to go.
