FOR OUR SONS

before they are twenty

There is a publication called: Families and High Schools, organ of the Federation of Parents' Associations. It seems that parents need to unite, to join forces, to form unions to defend themselves against their kids, even when they have stuck their kids in high school.

Now a parent has just given Families and High Schools an assignment whose beginning is excellent, but whose second part is nothing but barbarism, in the precise sense of the term.

It is a question, first of all, of applying the English week to French schoolchildren, that is to say of giving all the young prisoners of the Petites Roquettes universitaires the benefit of an early release, on Saturday, release at noon.
Indeed, as the parent whose essay appears on the honor roll points out in excellent terms, the rest of Thursday and Sunday is often illusory. The child comes home on Saturday evening and Thursday at noon with a long list of homework to write, lessons to learn, when it is not a question of pensums distributed as a surplus and encouragement. Thus the days off are distinguished from the days of work in common in that they are devoted to solitary work, unless the father sticks to it also (but there are fathers who are unfit for the Latin theme and who would show a humiliating inferiority in the matter of new geography).

With the system of the English week, the Saturday afternoon would be used for the various chores which, according to the most respectable pedagogical traditions, must be accomplished within the family. And on Sunday, according to the paternal tastes or the maternal principles, the kid could freely go and have fun at the cinema, yawn at vespers or get dented at football. Bravo! Excellent idea! The middle school students, their faces beaming, are already preparing to award the title of "nice guy" to this parent.

But the parent, coldly, continues "How to make up for the seventy-four hours lost annually because of this?" Which proves that the assignment awarded by Familles et Lycées is as much an arithmetic problem as a French essay. And here is the solution:

"The seventy-four hours lost will be replaced by reducing the summer vacation to two months, from July 15 to September 15." Because, according to the federal bulletin, parents, in general, believe that their children are being made to learn too much in too little time; so it is appropriate to extend the effective length of the school year by reducing the vacation and implementing the English week.

This would prove that some parents are in favor of intensive methods of methodical stupefaction; which does honor neither to their hearts nor to their judgment. Children learn too little because we want to teach them too much. What needs to be shortened is not the holidays, but the programs.
For a kid who wants to learn, as for a kid who wants to know nothing, time has no effect. Too long an application tires the best disciplined attention. Excessive work disgusts work, as one disgusts oneself with the best things, seen, drunk or read in too great a quantity. When it comes to work, only quality matters.

"Seventy-four hours wasted!" exclaims this father of a student, who will allow me to respectfully call him an old nut (and all the young students, whose holidays we want to cut down on at the best end, will join me in awarding him this mention... all, except his son, of course).

Seventy-four hours wasted? But no, old turnip... these seventy-four hours will be gained, gained on the enemy.

For work, truly I tell you, is and always will be the mortal enemy of the human race.

G. DE LA FOUCHARDIÈRE.