Since pianist-host Gregory Charles spoke to the newspaper The Press on the Quebec education system, he receives many tomatoes by the head. That will teach him not to leave the spittoon to the specialists! grumble several voices.
Inevitably, whoever dares to rant is wrong on certain points and pays for it. No, the state will not restore separate classes for boys and girls nor will it slash free education at its suggestion: false leads.
Without necessarily having the right solutions, this artist asks relevant questions about the dropout rate for boys, an area in which Quebec is the sad champion from coast to coast. So what to do? The middle tears his hair out without finding an emergency exit. Opening this debate in the public square had something heroic about it.
If more citizens felt involved in education and spoke out like Gregory Charles, more Quebecers would turn to education, knowledge would be less devalued on our shores, culture and the quality of the collective language would would be better off, the illiteracy rate would stop skimming, and boys would not run away from didactic apprenticeships. Because everything starts in the egg of education, at home and on the school benches. Everything can go wrong there too.
Sunday at Everybody talks about it, during a fascinating and fiery exchange with columnist Normand Baillargeon, Gregory Charles said that before offering his services as a teacher to second-year students, he had asked teachers what their least favorite course was. They had answered: history. The singing teacher Star Academythen taking the leap, will therefore have succeeded in interesting the second-persons for several years in the collective past of the Nation.
His charisma, his passion, his prestige had everything to galvanize a class; as a result, his experience was deemed unrepresentative. Nothing to encourage stars or fellows to put their noses in this minefield. We should encourage everyone to get involved in education, rather than pointing out the clumsiness of the daring ones who risk it.
By the way, why does the story turn students off so much? After all, this subject is neither the most difficult nor the least thrilling. Could it be that the reluctance of Quebec students, especially boys, is linked to an unloved collective path? In countries with a more triumphant past—France, for example, or the United States, which won its war of independence—does the learning of history inspire as much mistrust? I doubt. And if the defeat on the Plains of Abraham, the Treaty of Paris, the reign of the English and the influence of the clergy had weighed particularly on the shoulders of French-speaking boys, causing this rejection. What if they refused to identify with ancestors who had given up their arms?
Collective anti-intellectualism finds its sources in an initially rural ancestry and in a distrust of the elites. The latter had fled our shores in large numbers after the Conquest, or had mainly lined up behind the victors. As for the clergy, they gained by keeping the people in ignorance. Isn’t there a way to overcome these blockages by naming them stronger? And to reconcile the boys with the school, if it was first necessary to comfort them in their identity, by adapting the courses to our socio-cultural context? The resistance over the centuries of the French fact in our lands is admirable, it deserves to be transmitted without weighing down like a leaden screed. Aboriginals and Anglophones (yes!) have also contributed to the building of our society. To drop out of school is to refuse the legacy of the past. And ignoring its roots forces us to repeat painful and sterile patterns.
History, poorly taught to several generations, also remains a blind spot for too many adults. Few Quebecers obtain books on these issues to fill gaping gaps. Some are, however, vulgarized and fascinating — those of Jacques Lacoursière on New France, among others. Because education does not stop at school: it continues throughout a lifetime, especially through reading. A small segment of our population takes advantage of it.
For historical reasons, knowledge is not perceived among us as a virile ideal, neither is culture, and that is sad. From then on, few men turn to teaching to serve as models for boys, who drop out even more. And the same wheel spins, spins, spins. Understanding the workings of its mechanics would already be a starting point for mastering the cycle.