The Quebec education system is the most unequal in Canada and its public component now constitutes an “obstruct” to development, denounces director Érik Cimon in a powerful documentary entitled The school differently. It also points to possible solutions that would shake schools up considerably.
You can’t blame director Érik Cimon for beating around the bush: the first minutes of his film The school differently come up with a very harsh conclusion. He evokes a three-tier system where students are sorted according to their parents’ income, the neighborhood where they live, their neurological profile or their performance. Above all, it evokes a betrayal of the Parent commission, which revolutionized Quebec schools in the 1960s and wanted to make them a driving force for equal opportunity.
“The Parent report wanted public school to be a social elevator, it has become an obstacle to development,” says director Érik Cimon. If you send your child to regular school, you tell yourself that he will have a 15% chance of reaching university. I’m not saying that going to university is the only way to succeed in life, but this 15% is eloquent when we see that in the private sector, 60% of students go to university. . »
Digging the underside of the education system is a project that has interested Érik Cimon for years, given that its challenges, failures and successes have ramifications in many other spheres of society. “Education affects pretty much everything,” he observes. I could not understand why the system does not work and has so many flaws. So I asked as many questions as I could and I understood. »
What’s wrong with the education system? Competition between the public and the private sector, first.
PHOTO PATRICK SANFAÇON, THE PRESS
Érik Cimon, director of the documentary The school differently
People who have the means manage to have better services, better education and a better learning environment for their children. The competition is unequal. We put the children in competition from the elementary level except that there are some who put on running shoes and others to whom rocks are attached to their feet.
Érik Cimon, director of the documentary The school differently
These “rocks” are overcrowded classes, where students in difficulty are overrepresented and find themselves in front of teachers and in schools that do not have the resources to support them adequately. This lack of diversity is the consequence of skimming caused by the private system and the specialized public programs which select the best performing students and willingly exclude cases deemed “problematic”.
Rethinking assessments
One of the solutions, according to the director and the École ensemble movement: integrate private schools into the public system, finance them 100%, remove the possibility of selecting students and ensure that the remaining private schools are completely private and that the parents bear the entire bill. Economically, the project stands, assures the director. But this is only one step among others.
A substantial part of The school differently is interested in the type of evaluation carried out at the present time – grades – which is considered counterproductive by many experts and stakeholders, whether they work in the public or the private sector. “It breaks the students, judge Érik Cimon. Evaluation should be used to improve, to make mistakes and to learn from them, not to give marks that a child will drag around like cannonballs. »
What is at the heart of his film, basically, is a vision of education and the role it plays in society: a place of development and integration, a place of innovation, a place of mix that pulls young people up and allows them to develop critical thinking. Objectives that the current fragmented school struggles to achieve, he says, because of the composition of the classes, but also of the heavy structure which weighs on the public system.
“We don’t trust teachers, they don’t have professional freedom,” laments Érik Cimon. How is it that private schools are doing so well without school boards or service centres? How is it that they can act with autonomy and that public schools would not be able to? That’s the elephant in the room. »
The school differently gives a voice to enthusiastic, committed, but also indignant teachers who would like to see the system reinvented. However, and this is one of the most worrying aspects of Érik Cimon’s documentary, no one feels any real desire to tackle the fundamental issues. And the fact that most education ministers, with a few exceptions, send their own children to the private sector does not give the director much hope of seeing things change.
The school differently is presented Tuesday, at 8 p.m., on Télé-Québec and on video.telequebec.tv.