Some public schools, under the pretext that they offer an enriched program, have allowed themselves for years to go through a selection process for 4-year-old children so that they have the privilege of attending their ” prestigious” educational institution when they enter kindergarten – not at university to study medicine or nuclear physics, but in kindergarten! This is what we reconfirmed an article by Daphnée Dion-Viens published on June 181.
Private schools, moreover subsidized with public money, select their pedigree “foals”; it’s known. Public schools that offer specific projects can also do so, it is documented and legal, according to the Quebec Ministry of Education. What remains are the very ordinary public schools, which some go so far as to qualify as “trash” schools, since they have to take care, without the resources necessary to do so, of all these children who have been rejected by this selective and segregationist system or who have learning or behavioral problems.
So, how can Bernard Drainville veil his face at this point by continuing to affirm that the three-speed school does not exist when it is validated by his own ministry?
And above all, how can he pretend to ignore all the problems that can be caused by these discriminatory practices which take on the appearance of a kind of “social eugenics” and which have, among other things, the effect of undermining the social elevator , the principle of equal opportunity, while validating and accentuating the elitist nature of our education system?
Like cattle!
Imagine the scene: during these selection sessions, 4-year-old children are asked to participate in workshops so that “experts” in pedagogy can observe them in order to detect “preachers of success” as well as social skills in these toddlers who are only taking their first steps in life, who still have everything to discover, to learn and, above all, who are still very far from fully developing their cognitive faculties and physical that each of them develops at their own pace.
How not to revolt in front of such a practice! Because these children who have been selected or rejected as less than nothing will drag this final verdict with them for years to come, like those animals that were once branded with a hot iron to identify them properly.
Moreover, it has already been mentioned, at least by one of the schools that offer these special and enriched programs in kindergarten, that the performance of these children who have been accepted into their “stable” will be taken into consideration when the time to be selected once again, but this time to move from kindergarten to first grade. Undoubtedly, the same stratagem will continue for them in high school and then in university. And too bad for all those who have been identified as dunces!
This whole selection process, in addition to being inhuman, smacks of injustice and shows great insensitivity towards these children who did not ask to be analyzed, scrutinized, evaluated, labelled, selected or rejected.
A choice of society
It would never occur to me to blame the parents for the role they accept to play in this most cynical charade. Everyone wants the good of their children and some are ready to make any compromise to achieve it, even if it means making purely individualistic choices which, in the case that interests us, stand against the collective good and the health of our democracy.
But if the parents can hardly be blamed, it is quite different with the government and its Minister of Education who turn a blind eye to this inhuman selection process which is carried out to the detriment of innocent and unconscious children who are asked to behave like circus beasts.
Well no ! Children do not have to suffer the consequences of such a system at their age, they do not have to suffer a decision that can take on the appearance of a fatality that will penalize them and mark them for the rest of their lives. Pediatricians tell us: at this age, children do not all develop at the same rate, do not have the same intellectual and behavioral maturity. This is why we must respect these differences instead of making them factors which intervene in an important way in a process of unfair and disrespectful selection of children.
Before throwing such young children into the great circus of competition and selection, let them have time to have fun together, to sharpen their senses, to blossom, to discover their environment and above all to fraternize with their comrades, regardless of their social class, their parents’ income and their intellectual abilities. Our society has everything to gain by promoting social diversity.
And then, let’s have the humanity to offer children this moment of grace and innocence that they deserve.
* Réjean Bergeron published I want to be a slave! (2016), The amnesiac school or Rousseau’s children (2018) and Homer, life and nothing else! (2022)