Three days before the International Day of La Francophonie, we would like to talk about something else. But someone has to stick to it.
While the French elites wallow in the globish, it would be reassuring to say that on our side of the Atlantic, things are better. And yet, nay! Isn’t this confirmed by this report on French proficiency in college commissioned by ex-minister Danielle McCann in 2021 and made public only last week? The authors recall the mediocre results of students in French at the entrance to CEGEP. Above all, they emphasize how crucial this mastery is for academic success at all levels.
But what do they offer if not to teach grammar and spelling in CEGEP. And why not in masters and doctorate? “It’s like asking a CEGEP math teacher to teach the multiplication tables! Quite rightly replied the president of the National Federation of Quebec Teachers, Caroline Quesnel.
Because, unless the mission of the CEGEP is distorted, grammar and spelling have nothing to do in what remains the only place where literature still has a small place after being expelled from general education. But, the most astonishing thing in this report is that in the face of this bitter failure, the authors never seriously consider the serious shortcomings of the teaching of French in primary and secondary schools. As if any look at the past was forbidden to them. Not for a moment do they attempt to take a critical look at the reforms that were made twenty years ago and whose results are nevertheless now being shown in broad daylight.
Who still remembers the “Educational Renewal”, this vast reform set in motion in the early 2000s which consisted in making the child his own master? To reduce lectures in favor of project-based teaching. To refuse to define a minimum knowledge base in favor of permanent browsing. To despise dictations, notes and repetition deemed tyrannical. And above all never to bully our cherubim and their “self-esteem”.
One day, filled with pride, the daughter of a friend showed me the little illustrated “novels” she wrote at school. Often imaginative, they were nevertheless practically illegible as the spelling, spelling and grammar left something to be desired. At school, we didn’t want to curb his “creativity” by correcting it.
However, any teacher knows that grammar and spelling are skills that require rigorous, systematic and repetitive learning. The correction must be permanent, and this from an early age. Certainly not according to the wishes of the child. We do not develop such automatisms as a dabbler, but through sustained discipline as the school of our parents and grandparents knew how to do, despite its shortcomings.
On the contrary, the texts of the ministry take pride in proclaiming loud and clear that we no longer teach “traditional grammar”, but… the “new grammar”! A bit like, in another era, the licensed biologist Lyssenko spoke of “bourgeois science” and… “proletarian science”. Instead of learning and applying rules, pupils are invited to “observe” the place of words, to “discuss” the various spellings, to make “negotiated dictations” [sic] in order to establish a “consensus”, as if they themselves had to rediscover, gropingly, centuries-old codes.
It will therefore have taken “20 years of reform to arrive at a mastery of French that is lower than it has always been,” Lise Bissonnette recently affirmed in an interview with Radio-Canada. And the former director of Duty to conclude that “this reform has led us to a dead end”.
Those who look elsewhere are accomplices, because the causes of this failure have been analyzed for a long time. Allow me to quote our former headmistress again. “To make the school a more attractive living and learning environment, we favored approaches that imposed the fewest possible constraints, that valued the child by making him the ‘constructor’ of knowledge that he could draw in its immediate environment. Why bother with the names and descriptions of continents when you can walk around your own neighborhood? » (Lise Bissonnette, interviewsBoreal).
This is evidenced by the jargon and the intellectual clutter of the programs. Twenty years later, the results are obvious. But our experts persist in seeing nothing. This would require dislodging the ideology that reigns supreme in the “sciences of education”. A deleterious ideology and jargon which, by wanting to transform the “art of pedagogy” into science, as Professor Gaëtan Daoust of the University of Montreal said a long time ago, have turned it into a sad bureaucratic technique peppered with psycho pop. This was masterfully denounced in their time by the writer Jean Larose and our colleague Patrick Moreau (Why do our children leave school ignorant?Boreal).
Twenty years is a generation. Maybe it’s time to take stock? There is no doubt that somewhere a new minister is preparing to launch yet another “action plan” for the improvement of French. Why not ? But all of this will remain wishful thinking as long as the transmission of knowledge is not put back at the heart of the school.
Happy International Francophonie Day anyway…