The smart-people blogosphere is all abuzz about questions from the French college entrance exams, with comments from Matt Yglesias, Dana Goldstein, and Kevin Drum, among others. The general tone of the commentary is summed up by Goldstein’s question:
Could you ever imagine the SAT or ACT asking students to write an essay on such complex, intellectual topics?
The answer is “Sure. The answers would suck, but you could ask them.”
And that’s the important thing, here. What matters is not whether you ask ostentatiously intellectual questions of your students, but whether the answers they give are any good. It’s very nice to ask students to write essays on the topic “Does language betray thought?,” but it’s really easy to imagine getting a whole slew of responses that strain to reach the level of dorm-room bull sessions.
The form of the questions may indicate, as most are supposing, that the French are really doing a better job of teaching their students to think deeply about things. Or, it may mean that they’re teaching their students to traffic in pompous bullshit. There’s no way to know from just the questions– you also need to know what constitutes an acceptable answer.
The fact that the Alex Massie link above claims that the questions “Is it absurd to desire the impossible?” and “Are there questions which no science can answer?” come from the Science portion of the exam makes me vastly less impressed with the whole thing. This may well be a selection effect– the questions are a translation of an excerpt published in a French paper, as far as I can tell– but if their science standards are based around this sort of thing rather than, you know, asking students to answer questions about science, then I don’t have a great deal of confidence that their system is all that superior.
(And then, of course, there are a whole host of issues about tracking and earlier specialization, and the organization of the educational system, which all affect what you can expect students to do. I know next to nothing about the French system, so I can’t really comment, save to say that I wouldn’t jump directly to the conclusion that they’re objectively better based on a handful of showily Intellectual questions reported on a blog somewhere.)