With this series, the editorial team goes back to the sources of a Quebec model that is struggling in the hope of rekindling its first sparks, those that allowed our nation to distinguish itself from others. Today: the universality of the education system.
Post-war Quebec. The number of young people who attend school is small and they belong to a certain elite. Even though attendance at classes has been compulsory until the age of 14 since 1943, the statistics show nothing of a society where education plays a leading role. Barely a quarter of students reach 8e year and a slim 2% in the 12the year. In Canada in the 1950s, Quebec had the worst school enrollment rate.
But things are set to change. In a context of demographic growth, in the midst of an economic and industrial boom and with labour needs exploding, Quebec is preparing to experience a Quiet Revolution that is quiet in name only. In education, the changes brought about by the Parent Commission (its real name was the Royal Commission of Inquiry on Education in the Province of Quebec) are grandiose and build the structure of the education system as we still know it today: compulsory schooling until age 16, the abolition of traditional colleges, the deconfessionalization of the system, the advent of school boards, CEGEPs, kindergartens, the Université du Québec network, the Ministry of Education! This legacy is majestic.
Free access to school for all, regardless of origin or means, is a founding principle. School should no longer be a matter of financial means and class, insist the authors of the Parent report, which includes the eminent Guy Rocher, sociologist and great defender of education as the foundation of democracy, who has just celebrated his 100th anniversary.e birthday.
Twenty years ago, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Parent report, Guy Rocher revisited, in a text published in The dutythe objectives of the Parent Commission. “During the centuries and millennia preceding the 20the century, all educational systems were elitist: the human masses of our ancestors of all nations lived in illiteracy. Only a thin layer of an elite, variably selected or elected, had access to education and knowledge. The great revolution of the 20th centurye century was the overthrow of this immemorial regime by throwing open the doors of the school, the college, the university, their libraries and their laboratories. It was the revolution of the democratization of the education system.
This entry of Quebec into the modern world of education bears the signatures of the authors of the Parent report, but also that of Paul Gérin-Lajoie, a member of Jean Lesage’s Liberal team. He was the one who launched the Commission in 1961, as Minister of Youth, and who presided over the first projects of cultural and structural transformation of the network as First Minister of Education, in 1964.
The radical change is having a positive effect on the educational levels of young Quebecers. Almost all of the school attendance scenarios anticipated by the authors of the Parent report have been outdated, and school dropout rates, identified as a major problem, continue to fall. On the education of girls and young women, the universality of the education system has a liberating effect, the effects of which can still be seen today with the massive presence and success of girls in all levels of education.
Sixty years later, is the principle of equal opportunities at the heart of the Parent reform weakened? We will not soon forget the shock report produced by the Higher Council of Education (another rich creature of the Parent report, unfortunately suppressed by the current government), published in 2016 and whose title — Getting back on track for equity — came to highlight the fact that the Quebec school system remained the least equitable in Canada, that is to say that students’ results still depended largely on the socio-economic background from which they came.
Since the end of the 1980s, the proliferation of special programs practicing selection within public schools, all to compete with the appetite of private schools, has ended up creating what is still called the three-speed school. Unfortunately, the current Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, has already suggested that this “thesis” was due to an “ideological bias” rather than a concretely measurable effect on the classroom floor. This denial of reality is most damaging, especially when it comes from the competent authorities with the power to change the course of things.
Caught up in its race for performance, Quebec cannot forget the success of each individual on the path to its collective success. This principle of access to a quality school experience for all students, regardless of their socio-economic background, was at the heart of the wishes of the Parent report, which ardently defended social justice. Beware of the insidious effects of this school divided into strata, which once again favors the most privileged and the elites. It would be a devastating step backwards.