In 1958, the Saint-Amable school board closed its schools. She has no choice, she says. The money is missing. She is suffocating. For two months, the teachers have not been paid. Everyone is on the chopping block. Its schools no longer have the means to function. About 500 children are sent home.
Impavid, the Duplessis government does not lift a finger. He even claims that the commissioners collect too much money through the school tax. The marshals explain that they have to find some air. But the so ill-named Union Nationale, the machine of Duplessis, does not want to hear anything. These conservatives think only of reducing taxes and giving gifts to their friends, for electoral purposes.
In universities, things are not much better. Duplessis refuses the money from Ottawa. Education is a provincial responsibility, rightly argues the Prime Minister, taking refuge behind an autonomist screen that only serves to hide his laissez-faire attitude. He confuses, like others after him, this simple locking with a policy.
In the time of Duplessis, it was nevertheless constantly repeated, with drums and trumpets, that children enjoyed the best education system in the world. Nothing less. We got off on the braces all the better, in an endless series of speeches as hollow as they were pompous.
The reality was obviously quite different. Appalling illiteracy rates. An education reduced to the sole purpose of the reproduction of leaders, made in small factories for bachelors, out of classical colleges. For others, at most, learning the rudiments of a trade, in the name of the greatness of the catechism of the established order. For women, the horizon of the house. Antoine Rivard, pillar of the regime, affirms that they could not hope for better. Of course, new schools are being built. Of course, teachers are hired. It is the light necessary to illuminate all this that is lacking.
A real takeover of the school was achieved by the implementation of a very simple thing: a public transport system for the children. Jacques Parizeau reminded us of this during a striking speech delivered in 2012. In a book which has just been published, entitled What’s left of spring, Gabriel Pelletier outlines the main lines. Parizeau had spoken that evening, I remember well, of the yellow buses as a tremendous step forward for a society doomed, in the name of the established order, to be nothing but a world of va-nu- feet. Those yellow vehicles, argued Parizeau, we had no idea what they meant. They finally allowed children, wherever they came from, to go to school. Parizeau had explained that this should eventually take them even further, on the path to free education for all. Yes, it was important to bet more than ever on education, he said. It was, moreover, in his view, the only avenue possible in society to gain ground, to avoid going fallow.
Has the road been lost sight of? This year, many yellow buses are stopped for the start of classes. At the very least, 700 teachers are missing. At least, these are the jovial figures endorsed by the minister in the face of this incredible disappointment. In reality, according to school principals, it would be double. Not to mention the lack of specialists and staff for daycare services.
Several teachers, with haggard eyes, seem to have come straight out of a box of surprises. They were hired in a hurry. They don’t have a degree. They have no experience. They were not accompanied. And they find themselves, overnight, responsible for complete classes! The requirement of availability has supplanted that of competence. How can we be surprised that, in these conditions where they are doomed to improvise, the drop-out rates among teachers are staggering? One out of five teachers quit their job very quickly. And the children find themselves, too, on this same declining slope. This year, the number of students who have dropped out of school has increased by almost 30%, at least according to preliminary data compiled by the Montreal Journal.
The great modernization ambition put forward by François Legault for the education system boiled down to a small-time manager’s fad: the abolition of school boards. It was done with an eagerness that seemed like a rush, in an authoritarian way that this government has become accustomed to.
The other major project of François Legault, in this already frenzied setting, was the establishment of kindergarten classes for four-year-old children. These two measures, on the periphery of real emergencies, did not improve the situation. They made it worse, further stretching the elastic that was already threatening to snap.
In the Quebec classes, was it urgent to improvise a course in citizenship, in the name of the pride of being born, in the name of an assumed chauvinism, as the Deputy Prime Minister said? To be proud, despite so much misery, is proving to be as important, according to this government, as in the past to lend faith to the little catechism. Meanwhile, many children continue to go through their school year in cardboard trailers or in rotten schools, deprived of teachers worthy of the name.
How, in such a fragile setting, can we trust the Minister of Education? Jean-François Roberge went so far as to repeatedly claim to have Public Health approval for simple air quality tests in schools, when this turned out to be false, archival. This immediately gives the measure of the rest.
The education system is expensive. We already knew that. Under the guidance of happy spirits, for several years, we now learn what ignorance will end up costing us.