Are American Teachers Too Nice?

My fifth-grade daughter Ella and I shook hands with her pediatrician, then he launched his check-up questions, starting with “How’s school?”

“The teachers are too nice,” Ella said.

He repressed a grin that struggled to creep up. “That’s not usually the complaint I get. Kids say their teachers aren’t nice enough.”

 Ella shrugged.

“Maybe you mean they don’t keep order in the classroom, they let kids act however they want.”

“No,” Ella said. “I mean they keep saying Good Job! even when somebody hasn’t done a good job.”

The doctor looked at me to see whether he was missing the sarcasm in Ella’s deadpan delivery.

I explained that Ella wasn’t reacting to her teachers specifically, but to the American way of praising students.“We just got back from France. Teachers are much stricter there. That’s what she’s used to.”

When Ella first started school in Paris, she was soft, overfed on an American diet of unearned praise. So it was a shock, when she saw that every piece of homework in France is graded on a scale of 20, and nobody—ever—gets a 20. “Only God gets 20,” I’ve heard people say. It is even possible to get a negative grade, since a point is taken off for every spelling error, and it’s not hard to have more than 20 errors in even one French sentence. I heard that children sometimes cried (if not in her class, at least in her school) when their test results came back. Those who didn’t cry in class sometimes did so at bedtime. If you didn’t have a thick skin, you could get beaten down.

Ella didn’t cry. Instead, she worked harder than she ever had in her short school life. The threat of a bad grade, either on paper or (worse) announced to the whole class after an oral exam, motivated her to do her best. To deserve the rare praise when it came. She doesn’t have a fragile ego. If she did, I bet the title of this blog post would be, “French Teachers Are Too Strict.” Without a question mark.

Everyone knows, after Pamela Druckerman’s book, Bringing Up Bebe (called French Children Don’t Throw Food in Britain) that stricter parenting means better behaved kids. I saw Druckerman speak in Paris, where she lives, and she won my heart. I dare you to find anything she says that isn’t common sense. But before I met her, when I’d only read how her critics summarized and sensationalized her work, I was ready to hate her. I don’t think I’m alone in that misperception because a woman in the audience at her talk said, “Isn’t your book just like Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother? You just want to make all us other mothers, whose children aren’t perfect, look bad?”

Druckerman replied that the Tiger Mother book and hers couldn’t be more different. Tiger mothers are ultra hands-on, spend much more time than the average Anglo or American mother on their kids, drilling them and supervising their violin practice. French mothers are ultra hands-off, teaching their children at a young age that they need to be self-sufficient. “Sois sage, comme une image,” or “Be still as a picture,” is their motto. Sage, though, means much more than still. It means wise, in the sense of smart enough to know you should be well-behaved, savvy enough that you don’t have to be told that it’s for your own good.

When Ella’s pediatrician finished checking her eyes and ears and grilling her about what she eats for breakfast, he pronounced her healthy, despite excessive levels of teacher niceness in her system. I told him that I’d try to even out the balance by being extra, extra strict at home. Now he let himself smile, and even laugh.