Kids start bringing work home from school at the age of six – work they have absolutely no interest in doing, and understandably so. Grammar exercises written in pedagogical jargon, dreadful poems to be memorized – all contributing another layer of forced labour to the already overloaded parents’ schedule. On top of that, everything that the kid has not understood at school now has to be explained at home. And the homework? Guess who gets stuck with it. It’s usually the merdeuf. Let’s hope that somewhere inside her there sleeps a frustrated classroom teacher because she is going to spend hours a week on this, until the kid becomes “autonomous” – which can take a long time. Sometimes the merdeuf is so exasperated by the kid’s crankiness that she ends up doing the homework herself. It’s a lot faster.
Some evenings it would take me an hour and a half to get through that homework. And yet my children were educated in a public school (but you can call it “School for the Poor”), where, if what I hear is true, the teaching staff is less demanding than those in the very choice schools in nice districts. Helping them with their homework for all those years was unspeakably tedious. I have to say that when I was a kid, I detested school. Explaining things bores me, and I hate to have to repeat things. And with my own kids I had the impression that I was going through all those hateful lessons all over again, until one day, at the end of my tether, I finally let go and said to them, “Kids, do it yourselves, and whatever happens, happens!”
Their marks ended up just as mediocre as they had always been, but at least I was freed from having to wade through that desiccated dust of drudgery.
What makes the homework load even more of a scandal is that written homework isn’t even supposed to be assigned in primary school, but the teachers seem to ignore this, probably to make themselves feel important. Furthermore, it’s clear that homework is a contributing factor to current social and cultural fragmentation, since kids with a parent at home or with someone paid to help them are the only ones who will ever get it all done. Why do parents put up with this nightmare? Because they think it will be good for the kids – they’ll be learning things that will be a valuable resource later on. At first I naively supposed that there was a small minority of knowledge revanchistes* who were disheartened at having to be tutors every day. It was only after some years that I realized that everyone was infected with this virus of Grandpa’s “good old methods”: debates over learning methods, the return to school uniforms, sermonizing about work and effort, disputes over single-sex education. One day they’ll want to go back to quill pens and whacking hands with rulers.
But school is not enough to put the child on the high road to the light of learning. Every self-respecting middle-class parent thinks that children have to read. They agonize about it: “How can I get the kid to read?” It’s an important challenge: the dear little one’s personal development depends on it, as does the growth of her intelligence and the flight of her imagination.
You can hear these typical chauvinists, totally taken in by all this, hardly reading a book a year themselves (and you should see what books), pronouncing on the importance of reading. They repeat to their kids the same mantra that we always got, and that no longer applies in a world where plumbers earn more than doctors or lawyers: “If you do well at school, then you’re sure to get a good job later.”
As a matter of fact, this is a complete misunderstanding, because reading is success’s worst enemy. Children who read all the time turn into total flakes. When I was a kid, nothing else interested me, not school, not music, not hikes, not holidays. The result: I became completely asocial and incapable of teamwork. So does a real passion for reading in fact make you useless to your fellow humans? Well, I exaggerate. A bit. Sometimes kids who really love reading become the Auxiliary Troops of Intelligence, culture’s casual labour – publishers’ interns, bookstore clerks, underpaid and ill-regarded freelance journalists. In any case, they’ll be overeducated for any jobs available in the marketplace. Eternally embittered, they’ll see business meetings as a form of torture, taking on a project as overwhelmingly tiresome, meeting management for a job evaluation as the clash of two different worlds. Now numerous, these misfits are doomed to extinction because young people are reading less and less, especially those who graduate from the prestigious institutions, famous big schools, and the like. So let’s get on with it – the nation’s élite just has to produce books and culture. Get thee behind me, Satan!
* Members of a movement in France after World War I, who promoted revenge against Germany primarily in the form of the recovery of lost territory. (Ed.)