A lost cause, education? The question, unfortunately, arises. If we send our child to the private sector, it is perhaps because we already tend more towards one answer than another…
Because what hope do we have, ultimately, for education if we consider it necessary to pay an additional amount out of our own pocket? What if we resign ourselves, often against our principles, to avoiding public school? Everyone’s school?
This question has been asked by teachers who have given up, and others who are currently thinking about it. Education is their cause. They invested their studies and their careers in it. This is their motivation. Personified by each student. Some, some requiring more attention, love, patience, tricks or energy. But each person embodies a unique ambition, and this, a priori, for their teacher.
This is an incredible number of bachelors in education who, in Quebec, have chosen to change careers or are about to do so.
So much abandonment, waste of human resources – read here with all the warmth that this word should normally evoke – is completely insane, and would indicate a serious and worrying management problem anywhere else.
But not for this government.
This tragic exodus of specialists, a real bleeding wound, leaves him indifferent. Obviously, he is not trying to hold them back. Rather to replace them, and quickly, thanks to reduced and accelerated training. As for those who remain, he will now be able to impose the training he deems relevant, to better alleviate the problems he has allowed to worsen. It is, so to speak, without constraints that the government will be able to impose its vision of education.
Thus, where the Higher Council of Education could comment on our education system, for example by criticizing inequalities, an institute will instead come to decide on good and bad educational approaches. As for the unions who claim to protect us from the abuses of managers, we are already telling them that management is none of their business.
No, nothing can concretely oppose this vision, essentially accounting, where flexibility serves above all to respond to the urgent needs of the economy, and to move teachers along the assembly line. A calculated, quantified vision. Success is after all just a number, no matter what’s behind it.
Beyond what the humans who work in education may feel, a number will have the last word.
This is results-based management (RBM).
But all the figures from the GAR will never allow us to understand the root of the problem. Because he is human. It touches on empathy, ethics, distress. To the presence, the real one.
Whatever Minister Bernard Drainville says, visiting even 50 schools does not allow you to understand the daily life of a teacher or a student. No more than visiting parliament would allow us to understand that of an MP.
The drama of the reality of those who do not have the luxury or the chance to be selected escapes those who impose it. The great principle of inclusion remains subordinate to that of exclusion when those who have the means are invited to choose separate, more interesting paths. Clearly, the particular paths of today are no longer those of then, and ordinary classrooms are now full of broken promises. Many of the hypocrites who claim today to be touched by the fate of these children are the same ones who loaded the dice of their destiny.
Their education has never been this government’s priority. His priorities never concerned them. Since coming to power, he has become more determined to reorganize the system in order to better control it. The school, which must be the project that supports and unites a society, has become nothing but a source of divisions and concerns.
In this context, despite the accumulated devastation, has education become a lost cause?
No.
At the end of this dehumanized system are teachers who, today, decide to stop everything to make it clear that this system no longer works. And that they cannot pay the price any longer.
For them, it cannot be a lost cause. They don’t want to sacrifice this job that they love, but they don’t want to be sacrificed for that. We would even dare to say that it is out of vocation that they go on strike.
These teachers are currently the last bastions in the defense of quality education in Quebec. You have to understand it.
In this sense, isn’t it surreal to be forced to deprive ourselves of money – to pay (very dearly) for a strike – simply to be heard? And thus risk angering a population whose support — above all — we want?
And this government expects us to choose between our salary and the learning conditions of our students, thus wanting to make us bear the odium before the population. Lack of money which he claims not to have. Which he would have had, however, if he had not chosen to invest it elsewhere, or to reduce the tax in an electoral strategy.
In short, let us judge it according to the importance we give to education, the economy, science, social justice, the price of a kilo of hamburger or our tax evasion — even hockey —, this government remains for us, teachers, an unscrupulous employer-legislator. Resolutely seeking to save money by imposing working conditions on us that go against what is promised to the population.
He will go as far as he can in this direction. It’s just a distraction. Message control. The fate of state employees, the sick and children of Quebec comes down to a communication strategy here. This should allow taxpayers’ money to be invested elsewhere.
Where it is truly “profitable”.