The Ideas page of Duty of Thursday, April 6 (page A7) is one of the most beautiful pages of the newspaper that I have read for fifty years. The dialogue between Gérard Bouchard and Yvon Rivard is so enlightening and respectful. I also noticed the photo that illustrated this page. I recognized my students there from 1969. They are seventy years old now. Young and joyful, they demonstrate for the defense of French. The image testifies to the debate between the intellectuals. One cannot help but think of today’s schoolchildren and their indifference to language. Did the Quiet Revolution fail?
“It was, in fact, to get a people out of its condition: illiterate, proletarian and colonized”, as Gérard Bouchard says. For education and ease, it was a success. But for addiction, we can doubt it. Not that political independence was missed. This failure was only a symptom. Indeed, the people of Quebec have largely adopted the Anglo-Saxon values of their masters. He worries and sometimes despises himself for not being like them. Pride bothers him. He loves neither his language nor his past. It does not encourage immigrants to become attached to it, with a few exceptions.
The intellectuals were so eager to emerge from the “great darkness” that education seemed to them to be essential: the Parent report, the Ministry of Education, Guy Rocher, Fernand Dumont and so many others. Little thought was given to restoring their dignity to the “potato eaters”. The slogan of the time was: “Who learns gets richer. And the ambiguity of this sentence was the sign of slippage. It should have been understood that a person’s education is an asset in itself. It was generally understood that education would give access to better salaries and to the ease of the masters.
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