C’mon. We all know the French are lazy. Really lazy. I mean they protest in the street when they threatened to increase the work week from like 4 hours to 4 hours and 7 minutes or something…
But I had no idea they were this lazy. Some French parents are actually protesting homework because in part it puts too much responsibility for their children learning on them. I am not making this up.
A group of French parents and teachers have called for a two-week boycott of homework in schools, saying it is useless, tiring and reinforces inequalities between children.
They say homework pushes the responsibility for learning on parents and causes rows between themselves and their children. And they conclude children would be better off reading a book.
“If the child hasn’t succeeded in doing the exercise at school, I don’t see how they’re going to succeed at home,” said Jean-Jacques Hazan, the president of the FCPE, the main French parents’ association, which represents parents and pupils in most of France’s educational establishments.
All you Frenchies repeat after me. Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar. Doomed.
March 28, 2012 at 4:27 am
Finally Pat, we agree on one thing.
Rover.
March 28, 2012 at 7:43 am
Compared to England? Nope, the French still aren't as lazy as the land of "four generations on welfare".
But then, we can't really blame the English—they don't really know how to make a living now that they haven't been allowed to steal everything from Ireland or India for a couple of decades.
The French do have some explaining to do, though, considering their work-ethic used to make Scotland or Scandinavia look like, well, England. Ditto the Italians, come to think of it.
March 28, 2012 at 1:10 pm
Interesting in light of the new parenting book "Bringing Up Bebe," which hails French parenting as oh so superior. I haven't read it because I like to keep my lunch down, but I did read (link forgotten) that the French spend significantly less time with their children than Americans even though they work fewer hours and have more leisure time. French mothers who don't work still send their children to full time day care/preschool. My theory is that the French were so beaten down by two horrific world wars that they now live as hedonistic nihilists.
March 28, 2012 at 2:21 pm
The Bringing Up Bebe book is hilarious to me because the average young Parisian mother with petitte bebes is not French but a Muslim imigrant.
March 28, 2012 at 4:02 pm
Pat, I think you're wrong on this one, and not just on the French-bashing (after all, their way of living is, I think, a good deal better than the American Protestant workaholism). How much of the average student's homework actually teaches them anything? Isn't most of it just make-work and useless projects involving crappy art and lots of posterboard with negligible educational value? It's very American to want kids scheduled 24/7 with homework and lots of activities, but I don't think it's good for them or the family as a whole – and yes, especially with a few kids, the bother for parents of having to oversee that much homework is a problem. I side with the French – the kids would be far better off reading a book.
For your further reading: http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/sydney-nsw/heres-the-real-truth-on-homework/story-e6freuzi-1226311860123
March 28, 2012 at 5:49 pm
On the opposite end of the spectrum are "college prep" high schools that regularly give 6 hours of homework..a night. My kids frequently have this amount of work. 6 hours of homework on top of a 7 hour high school work day leaves no time for family life, recreational reading or fun.
April 2, 2012 at 10:56 pm
School hours are often taken up with crowd-control rather than actual lecture or studying, and to make up for the lost time teachers assign the entire lesson to the students as homework. The child comes home knowing nothing, and whether or not they pass the class depends on how good at tutoring their parents are.
In other cases the homework given is mindless fill-in-the-blank worksheets, or decorate-a-shoebox crafts, which don't really impart or solidify knowledge.
In my school days, I was so bored in class that I would just sit and read a book. I got straight A's anyway. That's why I quit in order to homeschool.