Jeremy Laporte & Family

This quote from Dr. Bok summarizes my feelings regarding some information I read this morning while covering the news. A few of the articles I read revolted me. Some of them concerning Iran and the Health Care bill in the U.S. didn’t please me but being a foreigner in the U.S.; I don’t have much of an option than to just keeping it quiet.

Though another article in France raised some red flags and I’m just in the mood to tell people what I think. The article deals with education and the minister of education testing a plan to reduce the number of students in High School skipping classes. The plan is currently being tested in 3 high schools over France and consists of paying the students if they attend school. If they reach their attendance goals the students can then benefit from an end of the year trip or having the written part of their driving license paid for. A lot of people in France are shocked by this project and so am I.
The minister of education has it backwards, he is thinking of rewarding those who are not doing right, for doing what they are supposed to do in the first place. The whole thing is just totally unfair because financially it would put a huge hole in the government budget. It’s very ironic that this budget is coming out of the pockets of those who work and  they would ended up benefiting people who are already slacking before even being in the workforce.

I’m not even talking about the feelings of jealousy everybody else will have. Yes, I’m jealous that the government never paid for a trip somewhere cool when I was in school, I had to work and earn every cent for my drivers license while I always attended all of my classes at school! It reminds me of an experience that our family had with one of my brothers (no offense ). My parents didn’t like us to suck our thumb when we were very young. I had a deal with my parents that if I stopped sucking my thumb I would get something I wanted (I have no idea what it was) it worked with me. But with my brother, he would stop for a while, get the reward and then start sucking his thumb again. Every time my parents offered him something else he wanted to help him stop. After a while my brother finally stopped sucking his thumb but I remember how jealous I was, I thought my brother was ripping my parents off and I didn’t get as many presents as he did. Something needs to be done to counter students skipping classes but rewarding them in my opinion is not the way of doing it.
The French education is a huge dinosaur that needs to be revamped. Sadly, every time somebody tries to upgrade one of the French dinosaurs it’s disturbing the cozy routine of some people who start screaming murder.

In my opinion, the first change that should be made on education would be to keep education mandatory until a certain level that would allow the students to secure a job. I consider this level to be BAC+2 or professional formation. Under that everybody knows that you won’t get any job, so why keep education mandatory until 16 and then have students who struggle with school allowed to skip classes and struggle all the rest of their life? Decades ago when school was mandatory until 14 or 16 the situation was different. If you left school at that age it was because you had a job already like helping at the farm, they knew the value of hard work and soon after they would marry and were sufficiently mature to support their family. Now if you look at somebody leaving school at 16, he or she won’t have a job, they haven’t learned the value of hard work because they have never worked yet and for most of them are not mature enough to take care of a family.

A second reform would be to get rid of free schooling. At least until their child is 18 if the parents had to pay a percentage of their wage for schooling their children, not through taxes but direct pay to the school, the parents would certainly be more interested by their children putting into good use their hard earned money. This reform is just a thought and is not developed correctly. My goal is to have parents and children understand that education is not free and like everything else in life it costs hard work and money. But at the same time education should be available to everybody.

But is it the price needed to pay to prevent teachers from taking the freedom of the students going through their classes? Until the end of high school, I was always just an average student. It was partly my fault because I was satisfied with average, I didn’t know where I was truly going, I was a teenager, and had never fully grasped my potential. The last point is mostly due to teachers. I remember my English teacher before high school: Miss Chereau. Because I was just not good with English, she would mock me, belittle me and humiliate me every day in front of the class. Looking back at it, her attitude with me was very close to mental abuse. The only things she did to “help” was to put me in tutoring that cost my parents extra money and brought her extra income, and because she was the tutor it gave her an opportunity to mock me even more. I don’t remember how many times she told me that I will never succeed at anything in my life, that I was a loser and an idiot., that my English was not worthy of coming out of a pigs mouth… Well I personally want to believe that my life and English are a bit better than whatever she imagined. It’s not easy to see somebody’s potential but teachers needs to develop this skill and make it the main part of their program. They don’t have the right to prevent me from doing things because they believe I don’t have the ability to do it! Teachers need to be positive with their students and encourage them and do whatever it takes to help them to succeed. My wife told me of her teachers in high school, who would do whatever it took to help their students be able to pass their classes, everything except cheat, or lie. They would let them turn in late assignments or do lots of extra credit or help them by taking out of their own time to tutor them. We need teachers who have a love of teaching and children and have the desire for them to succeed in life. They are the ones teaching our future generations so we need the best of the best. 

Well, I think, I’m done complaining for the day but changes need to be done in the French education system which is not adapted to present needs  but paying a few students to do what they are suppose to do and what everybody else is already doing is not the right direction to take.