Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

As a French parent who speaks Americanese on the Twitters (you should follow me here by the way), I must have been asked countless times what I think about the latest parenting meme: the idea that French parenting is superior to American parenting.

The basic gist is that French parents know how to be more strict, kowtow less to their children, and as a result their children are better behaved.

Oh boy.

Depending on your perspective, I am either the worst or the best person to ask about this, because I view the first 20 years of my life as a constant fight against the education ideas that rule in France. Now that I have a child, my almost monomaniacal obsession is how to protect her from French parenting and French education, which is why we are considering Montessori schools and homeschooling/unschooling rather than put her in French schools. (Let me rephrase that: I am considering setting myself on fire rather than put her in French schools.)

The way French education works, and I don't know if I could put it in a more charitable way, is that it seeks to mercilessly beat any shred of nonconformity out of children (the beating is now done mostly psychologically) so that they may be slotted into a society that, itself, treats nonconformity the way the immune system treats foreign elements.