Observing Isabelle Guigou guide 24 young pupils through a preschool class at a Parisian primary school is a little like watching Napoleon direct his troops at the battle of Austerlitz -- discipline and order rolled out on a vast plain of puzzles, flash cards and poster paint.
In Reggio Emilia, a prosperous Northern Italian city, children at La Villetta preschool play dress-up, paint, draw, model clay, shape rubber tubes and recycled paper, engaging in rich creative play that is unstructured in everything except a tasteful aesthetic usually found in Prada shop windows.
France's 19,000 ecoles maternelles and the preschools of Reggio Emilia are European showcases -- two very different but widely imitated methods of early childhood education. Both are under American scrutiny as teachers, parents and community leaders grapple with President Bush's plan to redesign the Head Start program by providing more early reading instruction.
The contrast of France and Reggio Emilia echoes the battle lines in the United States between conservative educators who want a scripted preschool curriculum and so-called progressives who think it wiser to let children develop at their own pace.
Actually, both systems foster early learning, thanks to generous government funding. In both places, preschool education is seen as an inalienable, universal right, not as a privilege for the rich or a welfare benefit for the poor.
The debate over early childhood learning, which boils down to how much structured learning and how early, is heating up in the United States. The American Federation of Teachers sent a high-level delegation, including a top Head Start official, to France this month to study preschools.
Interestingly, however, the French Minister of Education, Jack Lang, sent his delegation, which included his wife, to Reggio Emilia in late March, to observe how Italians use artistic expression as their fundamental learning tool.
"I feel that Reggio Emilia has achieved the ideal when it comes to the full blooming of the child," Mr. Lang said. A former minister of culture, Mr. Lang has pledged to introduce more art into the French education system, including preschools. "I am fighting to have our schools harmoniously develop both the rational and the artistic in children. Both sides are necessary."
Rationality, or art for learning's sake, remains a priority for French teachers working with underprivileged children. In a large, well-stocked modern preschool classroom at La Goutte d'Or, a primary school which serves a poor, mostly immigrant neighborhood of Paris, 3- and 4-year-olds were seated on tiny benches around Miss Guigou as she helped them to "read" the names of colors by identifying the first letter. Miss Guigou lifted a flashcard with the word "vert" (green) and Abdelaziz, 4, delightedly recognized the letter V, though it actually made him think of "ventre" (belly).
When they split up around tables to color pictures of hats with the colors they had identified, Souhila, 4, grabbed a red crayon and began bloodying a hat meant to be yellow, a mistake that Miss Guigou corrected. "Why did you pick red?" she asked. "Because I didn't pay attention?" the 4-year-old replied. "Correct," Miss Guigou said. "You did not pay attention. Now, try yellow."
In the United States, educators are still debating whether early learning programs are a good idea. In France parents, teachers and government officials made that decision in 1921. The French goal is not to teach children to read early, but to carefully prepare small children for the social and academic demands of first grade focusing on communication and vocabulary, which their studies suggest help determine the child's performance in elementary school.
"The first thing parents and children have to understand when they cross this threshold is that this is school, not day care," Pascale Giraudon, the director of La Goutte d'Or, explained. "They are here to learn."
France prides itself on guaranteeing quality preschool care that is free and universal. Preschool teachers are paid the same salary and benefits and get the same training as school teachers. Today, every French child begins preschool at 3.
Now, the French are debating whether it is suited for 2-year-olds. "Studies suggest that there is not any great advantage for middle-class 2-year-olds but there is clearly a benefit for poor children," said Agnes Florin, a psychologist at the University of Nantes who has studied preschool education for 2-year-olds. Poor children, she explained, profited from preschool exposure to games, activities and social interaction often missing at home.
The French government gives special attention to schools that serve poor neighborhoods, limiting their class sizes to 25, and assigning more teaching assistants to each school.
The French preschool curriculum is laid out in a tidy pamphlet published by the education ministry. All French preschool programs include a hot lunch, naptime, story telling, drawing, painting and dance.
An accordion player comes to Miss Guigou's class to provide music for dancing. Classroom fun is veined with pedagogical purpose, whether the task is making masks for carnival ("what is the first letter in the word, 'clown?") or counting eggs used to bake a cake collected that morning from the pet hens of Goutte d'Or.
Spontaneity, however, is limited, both because class sizes do not easily permit it, and because the French have a flair for regimentation.
In a municipal preschool in Reggio Emilia, where two teachers supervise a class of less than 20, the word "no" rarely passes a grownup's lips. There are no wrong answers, or written report cards. Children, sprawled on thick carpets, work in small, quiet groups on complex art projects in sunlit classrooms that are to an ordinary, well-stocked preschool what a Lamborghini is to a Citroen.
There are no alphabet charts, blackboards or cuts outs of Mickey Mouse. The walls are covered in children's art, natural wood shelves are exquisitely lined with glass jars of polished stones, wood chips, silver marbles and pastel-colored seaglass.
As in France, even toddlers in Reggio Emilia eat a hot lunch on porcelain plates and glasses, a culturally-embedded faith that small children can be trusted to eat in a civilized way.
"We don't believe in formal instruction," said Angela Barozzi, a preschool teacher at La Villetta "We try to nurture each child s innate desire to communicate and develop their joy of learning." The preschools of Reggio Emilia are unique in Italy, and they began as a bold social experiment more than 50 years ago, when the area was devastated after the war, and parents built their own schools and recruited teachers eager to develop a new, progressive approach.
The city now has 22 preschools and 14 child care centers that take babies as young as 4 months. It is an expensive system: The city dedicates 11 percent of its budget to its preschools, and those funds only cover 25 percent of their cost. Parents pay fees of up to $140 a month depending on their means.
Reggio Emilia has become prosperous over the years. Only 2 percent of parents are poor enough to qualify for free admission.
Its method has been adapted successfully in other countries, but Reggio Emilia has never done studies to evaluate the efficacy of their approach. Amelia Gambetti, a former teacher who now coordinates "Reggio Children," a nonprofit association, looked injured when asked for test scores showing that Reggio Emilia preschoolers perform better in school than others. "Often, yes, but school isn't everything," she replied quietly.
That unCartesian attitude irritates some French education experts. "The first generation of Reggio Emilia children are now in their 50's," Frederique Lefevre, a French consultant, noted huffily. "You would think that by now they could tell us whether their system works."
American educators see a lesson in both systems. "In Europe, the choice of whether or not to do preschool is not tied to reading test results," said Marilou Hyson, a director at the National Institute for Early Childhood Professional Development in Washington. "It's not a utilitarian, show-me-the-payoff mentality. They truly believe that preschool is a fundamental right of every child."
GRAPHIC: Photo: "The first thing parents and children have to understand when they cross this threshold is that this is school, not day care," says Pascale Giraudon, center, director of La Goutte d'Or primary school in Paris. (Ludovic Careme for The New York Times)