France’s Socialist President Calls for End of Homework
via Pencils Down? French Plan Would End Homework : NPR.
In the name of equality, the French government has proposed doing away with homework in elementary and junior high school. French President Francois Hollande argues that homework penalizes children with difficult home situations, but even the people whom the proposal is supposed to help disagree.
It’s 5:30 p.m. and getting dark outside, as kids pour out of Gutenberg Elementary School in Paris 15th arrondissement. Parents and other caregivers wait outside to collect their children. Aissata Toure, 20, is here with her younger sister in tow. She’s come to pick up her 7-year-old son. Toure says she’s against Hollande’s proposal to do away with homework.
“It’s not a good idea at all because even at a young age, having individual work at home helps build maturity and responsibility,” she says, “and if it’s something they didn’t quite get in school, the parents can help them. Homework is important for a kid’s future.”
….
There’s another big reason the French government is making changing school policy a top priority, Gumbel says.
“The French are discovering — to their horror — that their performance internationally has been declining over the last 10 years. The French actually are performing [worse] than the Americans in reading and science,” he says.
This is a huge shock, Gumbel says, to a country that long considered itself an education pioneer.
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Related at PJ Lifestyle:
Let’s see…our international comparative scores are deteriorating, and we need to change something…. I know! Let’s have the students work less at learning! That’s the ticket!
Mais, c’est logique, non?
Wow, echoes of Harrison Bergeron. Let’s handicap the kids who have a decent home life (and parents smart enough to help them) to level the playing field for those who don’t.
Now you understand left/liberals…
One of my favorite short stories! When I read it as a child I thought it a bit ridiculous, but now I feel more like maybe Mr. Vonnegut was on to something. Anyone that hasn’t read it search online and give it 15 minutes of your time (I like to imagine big sis as the handicapper general).
Why not? They’ve done away with thinking anyway. France, pioneers of idiocy. Can’t wait for the new Sultanate of Marseille.
/sigh Once again, looking at emotion and measurand rather than the actual thing itself.
Kids in bad homes may not do homework as often, so they get lower grades. However, they do do SOME homework, so they do SOME learning.
Kids in good homes will be provided with homework by their parents, if not by the school. Their parents will provide structure. Kids in bad homes won’t. Getting rid of homework gets rid of the only structured out-of-school learning kids in bad homes have, without impacting the learning of the kids in good homes.
So end result: Poor kids get no bad homework grades, and instead get less education. Way to help them out!
That’s the way socialism works: equality of the lowest common denominator. That will always be so because it is impossible to raise up everyone to the same level, but entirely possible to stamp down the majority to the lowest level, while the elite live off the fat of the land: their reward for all that boot to face stomping do.
Hearken to the great C. S. Lewis:
[From Screwtape Proposes A Toast]