Bill 23 in education, in addition to granting disproportionate power to the Minister of Education and further eroding that of teachers, shows a profound ignorance not only of the terrain, but also of the methods of proof that have established themselves in the field of the human sciences.
The creation of a Fuel Excellence Institute with so-called convincing results1 typical of an experimental approach and therefore not very sensitive to what is unique about people, including the language and cultural practices with which they give meaning to their school experience, is eloquent. The choice, again exclusive, of a so-called explicit type of teaching is also eloquent, as if, reminds the didactician Yves Reuter (2019), such a pedagogy was not illusory, among other things because it supposes an impossible incessant control “of all the social characteristics of communication”, as the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron clearly demonstrated more than 50 years ago in their still topical work The reproduction (1970).
In this case, this project to create an institute which intends to restrict the methods of acceptable proof, to define what counts as science and, as a result, to promote without saying so a very positivist conception of science does not hold water.
If it were ever to materialize, it would imply that henceforth those authorized to say, reliably and legitimately, the world of education, the world of school, will have to adopt the Newspeak of conclusive results and an antediluvian idea of science. Rather than being interested in the variety of experiences that students bring to school and live within its walls or, even, in the mechanisms of normalization, control, visibility by which the School creates failure, they will have to stick to correlations between the variables of purified, flattened objects, devoid of history.
Moreover, the creation of such a body will be destructuring, particularly with regard to the allocation of research funds which are already not very generous in the world of education. It will also be so for these research centers and groups which have not waited for the movement of convincing results to set to work and shed light in a substantiated way, according to various approaches and methods, on the multiple contingencies and implicit aspects which format the educational situation. and offer, among other things, an inside knowledge.
However, according to the mechanistic perspective that underlies the said project, this diversity is ostracized in favor of a single and unitary approach, like these monocultures in agriculture whose ravages are well known. Do we really need this institute? Of such a dinosaur?
1. The expression “evidence data” is unfortunate, these “data” not being given, but well and truly worked on, obtained, as Bruno Latour liked to say, their production inevitably implying choices, whether of the journals explored, their publishing policy or the statistical models used, for example.