FRENCH PARENTING NOT SO HOT AS CLAIMED BY TRENDY HIPSTERS: “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. . . . It’s telling that the only place I can remember encountering children ‘better behaved’ than French children was in the Soviet Union, where my parents briefly worked and lived when I was a child.”

UPDATE: Reader Kent Peterson writes: “As a child of a French parent myself, I must insist that parenting and the educational system are not at all the same thing, be it in France or elsewhere, and that what may work extremely well in one context has little bearing on the other.”