I have been a researcher and teacher in the sociology of education since my return from studies in Paris in 1965. I have therefore known and followed 33 Ministers of Education since Paul Gérin-Lajoie. These records of service to the cause of education, exceptional in many respects, allow me to offer you a role play in which I am Prime Minister and I entrust you with the mandate of Education. But under certain conditions.
You will first have to think about Quebec education well beyond a four-year term and the next election. Until now, all of these ministers, except for Mr. Gérin-Lajoie, have suffered more or less seriously from what I call electoral myopia, an illness characterized by small, uncertain steps preventing us from seeing beyond the next election.
Added to this, in your case, is the fact that you have shown a certain impulsiveness in sensitive situations which does not sit well with the deep reflection on which one can build a lasting project. In order to be able to engage in long-term projects, you will therefore have to fight against two kinds of myopia, one inherent in a certain parliamentary culture, the other more linked, it seems, to your personality, and I would call myopia of temperament.
I will therefore entrust you with two mandates. First, you will have to build and set up a real basic school like there are in the Scandinavian countries, in Finland and probably elsewhere in the world. Secondly, you will have to undertake the difficult task of ensuring the social reconsideration of the teaching profession so that it becomes, for young Quebecers, an enviable and sought-after profession on a par with the most prestigious professions.
By definition, a real basic school (EF) has nothing to do with a school with selective and discriminatory streams as well as a school that is a private club for rich kids like too many Quebec schools are. The EF makes available to all, and this, for the first nine years of schooling, a common core of teaching and educational activities, a base socially defined as comprising the resources necessary to achieve a to uphold and defend human dignity throughout life, as well as to achieve full citizenship regardless of one’s origins and place in social space.
Everyone has access to this common core; what can vary is the time it will take each person to acquire it, and how. The EF class group is made up on a heterogeneous basis, thus promoting the experience of diversity and social solidarity, the strongest being invited to help the weakest. Which, as Laurier Fortin’s meta-analysis has shown, is far from harming their own advancement.
In the EF, no quantified evaluation before the seventh year of schooling. Subsequently, if numerical evaluation is used, it is essentially to enable the student to understand the meaning of his own development and not to compare him to his peers. A system of real options crowns this nine-year compulsory schooling. These options are essentially exploratory in nature and are intended solely to familiarize the student with various fields of human activity. They can in no way constitute prerequisites or prerequisites for admission to subsequent levels or to professional training.
With regard to the second mandate, that of ensuring the social revaluation of the teaching profession, I will limit myself here to two or three measures, deferring further considerations on the subject. This later is a discreet meeting in a quiet café of your choice that I request because, as an educational sociologist and because of my age, I belong to the short list of people who have known and followed all the Ministers of Education.
First, because of the very treacherous game of the “R” rating, teaching is too often second and third choice, if not outright relegation orientation. “Your R-score isn’t high enough, so you’re relegated to a less demanding orientation. There is therefore an urgent need to raise the R rating of teacher training programs at the highest level, that of the orientations that are currently popular with young people.
Secondly, any candidate for admission to a teacher training program must have in his application file a portfolio of educational experiences and activities of all kinds, the weight of which on the decision should be as important as the academic performance itself. said. This would have the effect of providing teachers with a first contingent of educational assistants.
Third, since teaching is an art and not a science, I would give more importance to practical training. Half theoretical, half practical inspired by the formula of companionship. This would have the effect of making available to teachers the help of a second contingent of apprentice teachers.
To prepare for this appointment, which I am requesting with confidence, I suggest you go through The taste for learning: a value to be shared (PUL, 2017), in which I come back to everything that could be the subject of your new mandate.