After the young people who are having difficulty conjugating their past participles (the apples that we ate, ate or ate?), here are the young people who are taking their French exam.
As my colleague Daphnée Dion-Viens told us on Monday, less than one in two young people have a passing grade in spelling and grammar during the secondary 5 French test last June.
“For spelling, not only did it not improve, but it declined a lot after the pandemic. It’s quite alarming,” said a professor of French didactics.
THE REAL DEALS
“We are something like a great people,” René Lévesque once said.
Uh… no, sorry.
The great peoples are proud, they master their language. They know how to write it and how to speak it.
I won’t make any friends, but when you immigrate, when you make the hard decision to uproot yourself and change countries, it’s to improve your living conditions.
And when you want to improve your living conditions, you associate yourself not with losers, but with winners.
However, a people who do not master their mother tongue are a people of losers.
It’s harsh, but it’s the reality.
When you don’t care about your culture, when you don’t care about your language, when you don’t know your history, when you refuse to make the only decisions that are necessary to ensure the survival of your people, when you tell yourself No to Twice, when you’d rather stay in a country that despises you than roll up your sleeves like your ancestors did and build a country that looks like you, well you’re one of the losers.
Do not complain, then, if the people who come to settle in your home hesitate to join your camp.
At some point, you have to tell yourself the real business!
We’ve seen our mastery of French decline for decades, and we’ve done nothing for decades.
We watch our heritage flow away like water from a bath whose cork has been removed, and we barely shrug our shoulders.
We are fascinated. We wonder how far it will go.
And instead of being demanding of our children in order to rectify the situation, on the contrary, we keep lowering the bar.
We dance the limbo.
Come on, lower! Even lower!
Always lower!
After Joual, Franglais!
And after Franglais, Chiac!
IT’S CHILL TO THE BONES!
And above all, please, do not impose dictation on young people!
It’s retrograde! Reactionary!
It imposes neoliberal values like competition! The evaluation! The hierarchy! Respect for the rules! Power!
And then, the “by heart”, it kills innovation! Initiative!
It’s like factory work! It crushes! It’s suffocating!
Let the children free! The important thing is that they express themselves!
They will invent a new language! New words! Who will end up in 25 years in the dictionary!
“Wag”! “Weh”! “Stiff”!
As a rapper said in The duty Tuesday is language genius!
And that’s how a people dies.
By laziness.
And indifference.