The Economist’s Paris Bureau Chief has a short and funny post on the French Education Minister to deal with the most important issue of our times: the lightening to the weight of the backpacks of French students:
AT LAST, a French education minister has decided to take on the weightiest of all scholarly matters: the absurdly overloaded backpacks that French pupils stagger off to school under each day. Xavier Darcos today set about demonstrating, with scales to hand, how unweidly, and unhealthy, these have now become. […] Mr Darcos has all sorts of good ideas for improving matters. He has launched a competition to design a lighter empty backpack: most of the models sold in stores in France are heavy even without anything in them, since they have to be reinforced in order to cope with the quantity of stuff put in them. He also wants schools to pay more attention to ordering lighter text books and thinner note-books, and is thinking about ways of using e-books more in schools.
And I thought naively that Sarkozy was revolutionizing France by changing water into wine and that his ministers were so anti-socialist and free market advocates that their ultimate goal was to Americanize France. Unless all of the Sarkozy enthusiasts are just that enthusiasts who don’t realize that he isn’t a prophet, but simply a politician who has to accept some of the particularities of his fellow citizens including their belief that government can be a force for good.
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