> The New York Times
> BYLINE: By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
>
> The French preschool curriculum is laid out in a tidy pamphlet
> published by the education ministry. All French preschool programs
> include a hot lunch, naptime, story telling, drawing, painting and
> dance.
>
> Spontaneity, however, is limited, both because class sizes do not
> easily permit it, and because the French have a flair for
> regimentation.
I used to wonder where all the fourth-rate hacks, incompetent word-trolls, zero-degree-writers and language-kludges in high school ended up. Now I now they end up at a special game preserve call the New York Times. No national stereotype is too lame, no crass xenophobism is too insulting to be simply dusted off, given some lead-free paint, and passed off as all the news fit for America's elites to print. It's like they write this according to a computer: Italy = fashion plates, France = Cartesian order. I can't wait for the investigation of Teutonic foundationalism and Spanish zest. A century after Henry James, the world he fled from is still churning out nameless articles from Woollett, holding up a silicon mirror to its own vanity in the nooks and crannies of the Old World, as blind to the world-system which it once controlled, and now controls it, as any provincial fundamentalism. The only difference between the 1900s and the 2000s, is that little hint: class sizes in the poorer neighborhoods are limited to 25. The EU invests in its children, while Bananamerica eats its young.
-- Dennis