We announced this week what seems to me to be great and important news in education: the government will finally not go ahead with the Dawson College expansion project.
It remains to be hoped that he will soon announce another big and important piece of news: that Bill 101 will be extended to CEGEPs, so that those who attend school in French will also have to do their college studies in that language. .
The arguments justifying this position abound.
Strong arguments
They have been put forward and repeated for a long time — and more recently by the researcher Frédéric Lacroix, who adds others.
We are then reminded, among other things, of the crucial importance of protecting the French language in a society, and in particular in a Montreal, which is rapidly becoming more English, particularly through higher education establishments and through the choice of university that international students do.
This takes place in a context where the signs of what we can only sometimes call, alas, contempt for this language and for those who speak it within our confederation are multiplying.
We have just had new sad proof of this. We recently learned that Ottawa is increasingly refusing French-speaking students temporary study permits. We also learned that we have a unilingual English Minister of Immigration (Immigration, no less!) in the Trudeau government. Finally, we have been informed these days of this decision of the Superior Court which deemed illegal the refusal of the Quebec Minister of Justice, Simon Jolin-Barrette, to demand, in the name of the defense of French, the bilingualism of provincial judges.
The Minister reacted to this rebuff by assuring that he did not want to spare “no effort to defend, promote and enhance the French language and to ensure that all Quebecers can access all positions, regardless of which ones”.
An important step in this direction would be to extend Bill 101 to CEGEPs.
To the arguments most often put forward to justify this policy, I would like to add others which, it seems to me, are not heard often enough and which relate to the very nature of this institution.
The institutional status of CEGEPs
CEGEPs, first of all, are places of transmission of a culture that is more knowledgeable, richer, more integrated and integral than that which is transmitted at primary and secondary level. By this culture and by the language of its transmission, one completes, one perfects an inscription in a cultural universe by reading literature and by studying French-speaking philosophy, by learning in a more thorough way the history and, in a word, through the whole curriculum, living in and by the language spoken by the majority here.
CEGEPs are also places of socialization, and this takes on new and important dimensions on the threshold of adulthood, which is that of the young people who attend them. We are less sheltered, isolated, from society as we are, and as we should be, at school: the whole of society penetrates there and makes this socialization an indispensable passage. to become full citizens of the French-speaking society in which we will live.
Finally, CEGEPs are places of preparation for employment. You come out with a profession if you have done a professional CEGEP; we are preparing to study at university in the other cases. Each time, the inscription of all that it has required and involved in the French-speaking world prepares, encourages, either to exercise one’s profession or to continue one’s training in the cultural universe where it began. On the contrary, the current situation pushes many towards the pursuit of studies in English and towards work in this language, especially for allophones.
The Parent commission went in this direction by writing that “young people aged 17 to 19 experience the transition to adulthood and find themselves in search of their personal, professional and civic identity”.
What precedes, I think, makes it possible to counter this argument of the free choice that individuals should be able to exercise regarding their attendance at a CEGEP, an argument that is often invoked against this obligation that we would make, if what I advocate were adopted, to pursue his college studies in French.
The question of freedom of choice in education is philosophically complex, and it is even more so in our country with these largely subsidized private schools which mean that it also arises on another level than that of language.
However, it is generally agreed that the obligation to attend public schools (or subsidized private schools, in our country) is legitimate, justified for example by the right of children to an open future and by the need to transmit a common culture to citizens. However, the case of the CEGEP is unique because of its status: this intermediary institution between school and university does not exist anywhere else. I think, without being able to develop the subject at length here, that what I have put forward, in particular about this particular cultural transmission done in CEGEP, justifies extending Bill 101 there.
I hope that the government in place will have the necessary courage to make this decisive gesture, which is essential and of which, it seems to me, civil society as a whole and the world of education in particular increasingly understand the ‘importance.
Not to mention the urgency…