printStill on the topic of education (previous post is “St. John’s: The Most Rigorous College In America & What Every Young Mind Needs”):
What’s of interest in the Economist article, “The End of the French Intellectual: From Zola to Houllebecq,” are these tidbits:
Attendance rose this year at the annual Paris book fair. Regional literary festivals are thriving. Philosophy is still a compulsory part of the school curriculum.
And last year the French elected a president who has a degree in philosophy and can cite Molière by heart. France may have lost its great intellectuals, but it has certainly not lost its intellectualism.
So French kids must still study philosophy. I wonder if it’s a rigorous course? And President Macaroni knows some good stuff, aside globalism and multilateralism. Molière is brilliant. So funny.
While there is pressure to dumb down, the French have not yet replaced history with social studies agitprop.
I’ll leave you with this hint at how good French schooling may be: “France is one of the countries where a pupil’s social background is one of the strongest predictors of his or her subsequent achievement.”
The French have not yet done the educational leveling we in America do to ensure that 43% of marks handed out in university are As.
Other than the educational information, the writer of “The End of the French Intellectual: From Zola to Houllebecq” disdains France’s few “reactionary essayists” and thinkers (namely right-leaning thinkers).
So much so that, having mentioned his disappointment at the rise the likes of “Éric Zemmour, a reactionary essayist, and Alain Finkielkraut, a formerly left-wing philosopher turned critic of multiculturalism”—the writer concludes that “France may have lost its great intellectuals.”
Better good schools for the kids, than the likes of that lefty degenerate, Mr. Sartre.