Following his interview with Everybody talks about itNormand Baillargeon wrote here last Saturday, in The duty of May 7: “Correcting these evils [de l’école québécoise] that we will have correctly circumscribed will be an immense task. To begin with, this requires agreeing on the purposes [….]. Because once these goals have been identified, we will have to decide on the best means to achieve them. »
Good news: these purposes are already “agreed upon”. And since 1948! In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations proclaimed that “education shall aim at the full development of the human personality and at the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms”.
In 1959, in its declaration of the rights of the child of 1959, the UN specified: the child “must benefit from an education which contributes to his general culture and enables him, under conditions of equal opportunities, to develop his faculties, his personal judgment and his sense of moral and social responsibility and to become a useful member of society”.
This declaration inspired the Parent Commission in 1962-1966, which reformulated it as follows: the school must pursue three aims: to ensure equal opportunities, to allow each child to reach the maximum of his or her possibilities, to ensure the preparation to the life.
Then, the law creating the Ministry of Education (1964) reiterated the main purpose of education: “Every child has the right to benefit from an education system that promotes the full development of his personality”.
In short, everything has been said and retold on this subject. However, every 10 or 15 years, the Quebec school experiences a new crisis and voices call for a new investigation.
Thus, 13 years after the Parent report, Minister Jean-Yvan Morin is launching a vast consultation on his Green Paper. He found that “things are not going well in the public school”. In 1979, he gave birth to the Orange Book, a policy statement and action plan. It begins with a statement of the aims of education which essentially repeats the previous statements and sets out the values on which they are based.
Then, in 1990, Minister Jean Garon convened the Estates General on Education and again held a “vast consultation” and launched a new reform. The next one won’t wait 13 years. In 1997, Minister Pauline Marois created a working group chaired by Paul Inchauspé, whose report was entitled: Reaffirm the school.
Normand Baillargeon uses the same pattern today: “Quebec, he writes, must engage in a vast collective consultation on education. »
In fact, the problem of the school is not linked to its finalities, nor even to the explicit goals which it is prescribed to pursue in the Educational Regimes on Education. They are in perfect harmony with the aims of education. The problem lies elsewhere, and it is that of the relevance of study programs which is often called into question with regard to the evolution of society and its multiple and contradictory expectations.
Here is an example. In the early 1980s, a home economics course was introduced. We wanted the school to prepare for real life and to promote the equality of women and men. Thus, my son learned to sew boxer shorts and my daughter built a pretty mobile wooden turtle! Until the Estates General on Education in 1995 decreed that schools had to return to “essential knowledge”. And the course disappeared from the curriculum.
For the time being, it is Minister Jean-François Roberge who has decided to replace the controversial Ethics and Religious Culture program with a new one entitled Culture and Quebec Citizenship. It will be based on three main axes: “Culture, Quebec citizenship as well as dialogue and critical thinking. The goals are respectively “to lead the student to fully understand his culture”, “to understand the foundations of Quebec citizenship and the values attached to it” and, finally, to “develop his critical spirit through the practice of dialogue and ethical reflection with respect for the dignity of others”. Very good. But how long will this program last? The bets are open. And why not a hockey lesson in elementary school?
In fact, education obeys the spirit of the times and the pressures of public opinion. The real issues are above all of an institutional nature. When you drop or change a program of study, it is the teachers concerned who suffer and the university training programs.
If there were tombstones from programs abandoned since the Parent reform, the cemetery would be cluttered!