When my father told me about the Great Depression of the 1930s, he would mention, with the shining eyes of a 10-year-old boy, the orange he had on a few occasions found as a present in his Christmas stocking. The consequences of the economic crisis had marked his youth. Fifteenth in a family of 17 children, he had also had to stop attending school in the fourth year. But as he liked to recall, this period had nonetheless been the source of several important social measures for his generation, including the creation of employment insurance.
We already have things to say about the changes in education brought on by the pandemic. Five “positive changes” are part of our narrative of the last 22 months and are likely, if we know how to seize the opportunities they offer, to improve in a lasting way the well-being and the academic success of our children and our teenagers. .
At first, Quebec has rarely been so concerned about the mental health of its young people. Increased anxiety, eating disorders and social isolation, especially of our teens, are just some of the fears voiced by pediatricians, psychologists, teachers and parents. As of 2022, we have the opportunity to continue to develop our mental health literacy to quickly recognize the signs that a young person, or an adult in school, is not doing well. Providing first aid training in mental health to all those working in schools and colleges would make it possible to perpetuate the prevention of emotional and behavioral problems at school.
The period of closure of schools has led to rapid learning in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT), especially for online education. The words Zoom, Teams and face-to-face, to name a few, are now part of our vocabulary. The situation here is excellent to accelerate and better support research on the optimal use of this type of education, its added value and best practices in teacher training.
Quebec has also stood out from other North American education systems by its determination to keep its schools open and by the diversification of the forms of assistance offered to young people in difficulty or behind in school. In addition to improving Alloprof’s services, the creation of the national tutoring program has obviously contributed to reducing school delays.
If there is an opportunity to be seized in the coming year, it is that of continuing in the same vein and intensifying, among other things to prevent the “summer slip”, our interventions with young people who are the most vulnerable.
The impact of the temporary closure of schools on students with disabilities and with adjustment and learning difficulties has accelerated the questioning of our way of identifying and helping young people with special needs. As of September 2020, the professional orders of education unanimously affirmed that the priority was to offer direct services to these students rather than to evaluate them for administrative purposes. We must definitively consecrate this change of direction in 2022 by distancing ourselves from the model based on a medical diagnosis, no longer having to catalog or even label students in order to offer them educational services.
Finally, we have probably never, as a society, valued the work of scientists so much. It is moreover thanks to the fundamental and applied research of the last two decades that vaccines have been able to be developed so rapidly. As with public health, our decisions and our interventions in education in the future must be based primarily on research and take as a reference for our actions the best practices that have been implemented and evaluated in Quebec and elsewhere. To do this, the creation in 2022 of a national institute of excellence in education (INEE) remains as important as ever.
Major disruptions create a climate conducive to major social advances. Let’s make sure that we too can tell the youngest, in a few years, that following the great COVID-19 pandemic, several things have improved in education.