French president wants to ban homework as unfair to poor kids

France’s Socialist President François Hollande made French students happy this week with a proposal to ban homework.

Is this just a clever ruse to win the votes of those students when they’re old enough to vote? Apparently not. It’s ideological — an attempt to make things more fair by preventing educated and affluent parents from helping their children. No, seriously. I’m not making this up.

Hollande and others who think the way he does believe that homework isn’t fair because kids from affluent families can get help from their educated parents, but kids from “disadvantaged” (poor and uneducated) families don’t get the help they need. So the solution is to make sure the kids from the better families can’t take advantage of their parents’ help anymore. According to Hollande’s proposal, all school work will have to be done at school. To be fair.

To implement his sweeping plans, Hollande plans to hire thousands more teachers and increase the number of hours that kids are in school each week. It’s unclear whether he’ll actually be able to implement the plan, but it’s what he’s pushing.

I have to tell you honestly that I don’t have an opinion about whether homework is a good thing for kids or not. I have no idea whether it helps them learn. When I was in school, I rarely did homework. I was pathetic, actually. Sometimes I’d slap out some semblance of the work during homeroom or between classes. Other times, I’d make up elaborate “dog ate my homework” lies. (I actually remember having to stand and explain to the class in the second grade why I didn’t have my homework. My story was creative, but probably not believable.)

I never found homework useful, but that might have been because I was academically lazy or perhaps because the work seemed too simply. I just know that it seemed useless. So if anybody would be inclined to ditch the whole idea, it’s me. But I know people who are far more qualified to comment on that than I’ll ever be. I’m just an overgrown kid who hated homework, not an expert.

If homework is useless busywork, let’s ditch it. But if it’s useful to educating children, then keep it around, even if kids with better-educated parents are more likely to get help at home. Despite the socialists’ dreams, we can’t make everybody just alike — and we can’t create “equality” by dragging some people down to a lower level.

Let’s be honest. Life isn’t fair. It’s not ever going to be fair.

It’s not fair that some men are better-looking than I am. As an unattractive man, I demand that we surgically alter the faces of the model type of guys — so we’ll be equal. It’s not fair that the genes I got from my mother make it really easy for me to gain weight and make it hard to get rid of it. So I demand that skinny people be forced to gain weight. Or at least wear a “fat suit” around all the time. It’s not fair that some people are born smarter than others. How about if we perform lobotomies on the smart kids to make sure they’re just as slow as the worst in class? Or give them “stupid drugs,” maybe. (Wait. We have television for that, don’t we?)

Some people are smarter or prettier or more athletic or more something than others. People aren’t all the same. We can’t make them all the same. And it would be horribly mistaken to even try.

This isn’t just a French issue. In its coverage of the story, the Washington Post mentions that some in this country oppose homework for the same reason. The obsession with creating artificial equality crosses border, but it seems to be found in those of the socialist or progressive mindset — people who are more interested in imposing a fantasy version of equality than in giving people equal opportunities and letting them compete.

I don’t have an opinion about whether to keep homework or ditch it. I’m definitely in favor of ditching the socialist mindset from which this particular idea springs, though.

Reality isn’t fair. It’s never going to be fair. The best thing we can do is help everybody to live life as well as possible with the cards that have been dealt to him — even the poor schmuck who has to live with a face like mine.