Mr. Bernard Drainville, never in my life as a sociologist of education in Quebec (more than fifty years) have I seen such broad and diverse opposition to a bill from the Ministry of Education than that which your Bill 23 provokes. In its current form, the project presents itself as the bric-a-brac of an improvised grocery basket in which we find provisions having no connection between them and which suggest that they are of little importance and that they will all pass, casually, through the mill, in front of a parliamentary majority acquired in advance. And you call it “reform”. However, in this “nothingness”, there is a real fragmentation bomb, a law within the law, the one which creates an Institute of excellence in education.
This creation will ultimately give the value of an educational dogma “of revealed faith” to the paradigm of proven data, which would then impose itself in a totalitarian manner as if teaching were a science. However, teaching is not a science. It’s an art. And it would be a gross error to subject the practice of this art to an immature empiricism elevated to the rank of dogma by narrow-mindedness. A bit like forcing an abstract painter to subjugate his creativity and paint using the techniques of Caravaggio.
Not to mention that this institute would ensure incontestable supremacy to an empirical approach which would exclude as valid and reliable the data of clinical research, intuition, reasoning, observation, qualitative analysis, the argument of logical reason. What we forget in all this is that the world of education needs psycho-socio-diversity as much as the global environment needs biodiversity to develop.
Even though I have been retired for some time, I have kept close enough contact with the community to realize that, among the people who are opposed to your bill, there are also colleagues who are not usually not on the same side of the barricade when it comes time to debate. Colleagues who have different, even opposing, educational ideologies, but who, under the threat of such a cataclysm, forget their differences and rally around a no pasarán to object to Bill 23.
When, for example, proponents of the qualitative approach join forces with enthusiasts of an empirical approach on a common position against Bill 23, it is because greater urgency requires that differences be silenced. Now, there are a host of these cases, Mr. Minister, in the letter to the chief scientist, for example, signed by more than 200 university professors, to oppose Bill 23. Never seen before. This is a clear sign that opposition to the project forms a very broad front. You cannot remain indifferent to such an outcry.
In secret
But the “boutte du boutte” is given to us by two solid articles by Marie-Michèle Sioui, from Duty (September 9 and 11), which reveal to us that all the work of preparing the law was done in secret, on the sly. It was necessary for colleague Jacques Désautels to use the Access to Information Act to learn more about the juicy details of this plot, because it is indeed a conspiracy. The minister formed a committee made up of people who are all disciples of evidence. The Anglos would say “ birds of the same feathers “.
And he insisted that the opinions and recommendations of this committee remain confidential. So what did he have to hide? The name of the committee says a lot about the chiaroscuro of its mandate: Committee on Scientific Results and the Educational Environment.
All this is a sign of the profound immaturity of educational research, still very far from having reached the status of science. As things currently stand, this takes several forms: phenomena such as research immaturity, weak research training, intellectual inbreeding (inbreeding), which still means that too many education science departments hire young professors who have completed a baccalaureate, a master’s degree and a doctorate in the same department, often with the same management.
Added to this are phenomena such as the practical impossibility of isolating a variable from human behavior to the point of making it the sole cause of a given effect, the absence of a true epistemology guaranteeing the rigor of a research approach, combined with the incommensurability of the variables involved. All these factors combined which do not make it possible to foresee as possible, in the foreseeable future, or even desirable, banks of conclusive empirical data generalizable to large groups, as exists in the natural and physical sciences.
Minister, you have no choice. You have to let go! Withdraw your bill. Go back to the drawing board, and this time, taking into account in particular the many diverse opinions provided by the common front of opposition to Bill 23.