I'm certain you realize how easy it would be to dismantle the argument suggestion that government's passing laws is inherently "progress"? I'm assuming you have

I'm certain you realize how easy it would be to dismantle the argument suggestion that government's passing laws is inherently "progress"? I'm assuming you have some clever argument ready in response - please do share without the rhetorical games. --- And how would you propose measuring whether or not this experiment will be a success, lacking any control to measure it against? If it turns out French students are performing worse 20 years from now there will certainly have been countless other 'experiments' carried out since then, meaning any causality is going to be extremely difficult to trace. And similarly if they are performing better. By contrast when things are enacted locally we can often get samples of groups where things are very similar except for [x], which can help determine causality. Instead it all turns into, as usual, retrospective confirmation bias. People take what they want to be true, and attribute positive results to that while taking what they don't want to be true and attribute negative results to that. It's hardly a logical way of trying to achieve genuine "progress."