L’Éducation Nationale’s #1 Problem

With great power comes great responsibility.

The entire year I worked as an assistante de langues in Paris, teachers would take me aside and say, “they can’t read,” “they can’t understand,” “they’re little,” “they’re babies,” “they can’t write,” and even my youngest students would read and write in English without me asking. Children’s brains are built for one thing: learning, constantly, anything that could help them to excel in the great human race for the survival of the species, which is gravely threatened by many toxic creations of mankind itself.

Those teachers were lying, and they were telling a convenient lie to give themselves more power over the students. I don’t care if the French curriculum says “no writing in English at the age of 7,” to say French children are not capable of it is a lie. They are perfectly capable of learning anything they put their minds to.

If you tell someone they are inferior and stupid enough, they will start to believe it.

But the French education system is pushing them down. It’s a pretty convenient way to gain power over someone to say “you are not smart enough to know this,” but that is the hard-wired logic of the entire education system in France. And it’s such a shame because children helplessly believe that they are stupid and incapable, and that stays with them their entire lives.

But there is also a pretty out of control master/slave dialectic thing going on that historically enforced slavery. If you tell someone they are inferior and stupid enough, they will start to believe it.

Is there a more reprehensible, irresponsible, and problematic use of power than to lie to children and tell them they are incapable, stupid, bad at something?

Many a parent and student in France has nervously explained to me how their English teacher at school told them they were “null” in English, and so they just gave up hope.

Is there a more reprehensible, irresponsible, and problematic use of power than to lie to children and tell them they are incapable, stupid, bad at something?

It just seems to me an abuse of power in the crudest and most insidious terms. Particularly because it is throwing young, impressionable minds under the bus, and the future of France along with them.