His method is crude and colorful and thus apt to draw attention and the NYT’s Elaine Sciolino says it betrays his “sometimes sentimental and pedagogical approach to governing”—but you have to admit that the French president knows how to use his bully pulpit to good publicity effect:

 President Nicolas Sarkozy dropped an intellectual bombshell this week, surprising the nation and touching off waves of protest with his revision of the school curriculum: beginning next fall, he said, every fifth grader will have to learn the life story of one of the 11,000 French children killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust. …

Education Minister Xavier Darcos explained later that the aim of the plan was to “create an identification between a child of today and one of the same age who was deported and gassed.”

As I said: crude. But he has made his point.

“It is ignorance — not knowledge — that leads to the repetition of abominable situations,” he said. “You do not traumatize children by giving them the gift of the memory of a country.”

I don’t know about you, but I find this refreshing in light of the cringe-inducing self-abasement of the British in recent weeks.