We come out worried and admiring the viewing of the film A revision, by Catherine Therrien: worried, because it describes very well a drift in the education system; admiring, because the director has shown courage in denouncing this new ideology which wants the pupils (or students) to be always right, because they are customers that one must satisfy, them and their parents.
A competent and passionate teacher of philosophy is summoned, in a sometimes friendly, sometimes coercive manner, to revise upwards the mark given to the work of a Muslim student who has not respected the explicit criteria of correction, namely that the text argumentative must present three arguments based on reason and not on emotions or beliefs. Out of honesty and respect for his profession, the teacher refuses to change the grade and explains it to the student.
The resignation of more and more school administrations undermines the authority of the teaching profession.
The direction of the CEGEP, like the director of the philosophy department and the student associations fear that the refusal of the teacher to revise the mark will be considered as an anti-Muslim attitude, even racist, and that this will harm the CEGEP.
The new conception of the mission of education and the role of teachers is illustrated by the director who affirms: “The first responsibility of the teacher is to love his pupils”! He must therefore respect the feelings of each of his students and, if some of them feel offended, he must immediately correct his remarks and change his attitude. Thus we find on the walls of the CEGEP (fictitious): A lesson plan, it is negotiated. So, when it comes to the content and requirements of a course, students and teachers are on an equal footing, those who are there to learn and those who are there to teach, discover, transform …
Multiplication of cases
The cases are multiplying in Quebec where professors are constrained either by the administration, or by the surrounding discourse not to teach the work of such or such writer or thinker.
A poetry teacher has banned himself from broadcasting the magnificent film by Jean-Claude Labrecque, The night of poetry, because Michèle Lalonde recites her poem there Speak white.
This film is reminiscent of the assassination in 2020 of Samuel Paty, a French high school teacher. In an interview with the magazine Marianne, the writer and political scientist David di Nota returns to his analysis of the treatment of this murder by the school administration up to the National Education.
In his book, he shows in an unassailable way the prejudices, the lies and the cowardice that dot the administrative investigation where, to be others, the word of Paty, like that of many Muslim students and parents who defended him, was not taken into account. Not only was he not protected from the threats against him, but his words and the facts were twisted by administrative correctness.
Now, in class, we seem to confuse respect for others and benevolence with submission by the teaching body to the feelings of each and every one of the students. Can we criticize such and such a statement or such work of a transgender, black, Muslim or indigenous person without being immediately accused of being anti…?
Will we agree, at school, at CEGEP, at the university to take hold of the works of philosophers, painters and writers of our common culture, when they do not correspond to the dictates of the day and the susceptibilities of everyone ?
Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Flaubert, Shakespeare, Rimbaud, Ducharme and Cohen should they be denounced, because they did not speak out against slavery, the exploitation of women, pedophilia, homophobia or colonialism or against on the contrary have spoken of it in a “shocking” way? Should we hide part of our history when it shames us?
Isn’t the role of teachers, among other things, to expose what is debated in society in order to get pupils and students to understand the controversy, by analyzing the arguments presented in the light of established knowledge and available knowledge? To refuse this is to ignore the possibility of the creation and transmission of a common culture.