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I dread Tuesdays. It is the day that my daughter Olivia comes home from school with a poem that she has to learn off by heart. She normally has until Friday to get it right and so for the following days the poem is with us wherever we go. She recites it in the car, at breakfast, at the playground. By Friday her younger siblings can recite it, even the cat purrs along.

I dread Tuesdays. It is the day that my daughter Olivia comes home from school with a poem that she has to learn off by heart. She normally has until Friday to get it right and so for the following days the poem is with us wherever we go. She recites it in the car, at breakfast, at the playground. By Friday her younger siblings can recite it, even the cat purrs along.

I think it's a formidable discipline and sure to make her extremely clever in the long run but if you ask her what the poem is about she'll reply: "I've no idea, I just have to learn it."

If the new French President Nicolas Sarkozy (Sarko to friends and oponents alike), wants to change the way French people think (and therefore act in terms of labour laws, claiming benefits, work ethic) he has to start with the schools. Don't get me wrong, I love the French system, it is one of the reasons we moved there, but it does produce more intransigent and less imaginative adults than we have in the UK.

This is partly because they are not taught to think for themselves to the same extent as we are. An eighteen-year-old half-English boy I met told me he was asked to produce a literary criticism of a poem. He told the teacher what he thought of it.

"I don't want to know what you thought of it," said the teacher. "I want to know what the critics thought of it." And although French schools are brilliant at teaching a sense of how to behave and what is right and wrong (to my delight the children all stand up in class when a teacher walks in) there is a somewhat blinkered view that often makes the French less flexible than the Brits.

The phrase 'c'etait pas prevu' (it was not organised or planned) is a concept that I had never heard before moving to France. Now I hear it a lot, mainly from my child-minder. I could go out every night of the week if I wanted to, as long as I had booked her in to baby-sit at least a week in advance. If I suddenly get a dinner invitation (unlikely, because anyone French will have planned their dinner in advance) and I call her up to see if she can baby-sit I get the c'etait pas prevu response and a sigh of horror on the other end of the phone. Similarly if I change my plans she gets very edgy.

Another phrase you hear a lot is 'c'est pas normal' which loosely translated means it's not right. This is something Sarko will be hearing a lot as he tries to overhaul the French social security system. My children already use it.

The other day they had a girlfriend over for lunch. I served a salad. As my children don't eat vinaigrette I didn't put any on. But to the young Clemence this was 'not right'. She was also astounded to see that on the short school-run back after lunch I didn't make the children sit in their allocated car seats. I can imagine she went back home relating the "wild ways" of "les Anglais" on the hill.

Intransigence and an inability to see how something different can be good are going to be Sarko's worst enemies. But if I were him I would begin in the schools. If you put a frog straight into boiling water it will jump out; but if you put it into cold water and slowly heat the water up it won't realize what's going on until it's been cooked.

If he wants things to change, he needs to start slowly, so that the French don't notice until it is too late.