Quelle Stupid!

In the midst of our silliest of silly seasons, a modern election cycle containing a presidential race, it's nice to know that the United States does not stand alone in making certain that the least bright members of its citizenry have adequate representation at all levels of government.

Enter François Hollande, the recently-elected president of France, who has put together a package of educational reform measures that would outlaw homework. President Hollande has not proposed this measure as a way of securing support among the electorate-to-be, banking on the idea that adult voters will remember with gratitude the nice man who kept mean teachers from assigning them work to do (gasp!) after school was out! Of course, they may not be able to read his name on the ballot, but that situation can be remedied with the appropriate pictures.

No, President Hollande wants homework gone because some kids come from homes where parents aren't supportive of their children's schoolwork; i.e., they won't stand over little Pierre and forbid him his wine and foie gras until his math homework and that paper on Napoleon (that foul little Corsican!) are finished. Since some parents (hereinafter referred to as "meanies") do assist with their children's homework and support the need for the extra schoolwork, this creates an imbalance of student achievement. And Monsieur le President being a socialist, he views imbalances as something just this side of a fallen soufflé on the badness scale.

Of course, a lack of support in the home for children's education is a real problem, and not just in France. Scratch a low-performing student, find parents who either don't have the time to help Junior with his schoolwork or parents whose give-a-darn about Junior's care is pegged way at the low end of the scale.

So the solution inside the flickeringly-lit mind of President Hollande is not to try to create the conditions to exert social and peer pressure to get maman et papa to do some of their freaking job as parents. No, it's to take the places where the system actually produces something that works -- students performing better academically -- and ensure that it doesn't.

Ask a teacher and they'll tell you that while there really are almost no actually stupid students, there are plenty who don't try very hard and so give an excellent impression of one. Correcting that is not an easy, ten week seminar course. It's hard to make stupid people smart.

But as President Hollande so helpfully points out, it is not at all hard to make smart people stupid.