Aliyaaaah :
As someone who actually went through the French school system and now lives in the US, I think this video is oversimplifying BOTH systems.
In France, from the time you’re a child, you’re taught to be afraid of failure. Everything is /20, you’re constantly ranked and compared, and you’re made to believe that the wrong grades, the wrong orientation or the wrong Bac will determine the rest of your life. School isn’t just intellectually demanding, there is a culture of fear around failing that you really cannot understand unless you’ve experienced it.
And constantly bashing the American system while romanticizing the French one is strange to me because there are opportunities here that people in France don’t necessarily realize exist. Where I live in California, students can access things like the International Baccalaureate through public schools without paying private-school tuition. There are public bilingual and immersion programs, charter schools, and different educational models that families can access without automatically having to choose between the traditional public system and paying for private school. I experienced the IB myself, and you can absolutely have intellectual rigor without creating the same culture of fear around learning.
And the “wait until these kids enter the workforce” argument makes even less sense. French workers having paid vacation, RTT and stronger labor protections has nothing to do with having survived French school. Those are labor laws. You can be the worst student in France and still have those protections. You can graduate from Harvard and become a doctor in the US and still be subject to the American labor system. They are two completely separate issues.
I hate this “I went through it, so they should too” mentality. If we experienced something unnecessarily stressful or miserable, why would we want to preserve it for the next generation?
Kids questioning a system doesn’t automatically make them lazy. Sometimes they’re simply questioning things that previous generations were told to accept.
There is a difference between academic rigor and making children afraid of school. We should know the difference.
2026-10-04 20:07:40