In his government’s inaugural speech in 2018, Prime Minister François Legault said: “The first major priority I would like to address is education. For the first time since the 1960s, education will be the government’s top priority. Our great ambition is nothing less than to give each child all the tools to bring him to the end of his potential. I am convinced that all parties together we can share this noble ambition. Education is the future of the Quebec nation. »
Posted yesterday at 10:00 a.m.
After four years of reign, it cannot be said that the CAQ has achieved its noble ambition. It’s true, the government has significantly increased teachers’ salaries when they enter the profession and has launched several school construction and renovation projects. This latest initiative, however, has had the effect of revealing even more glaringly the maintenance deficit suffered by schools, which last year amounted to more than 5 billion dollars.1.
This explains why so many schools still do not have the right to adequate ventilation (during the pandemic, teachers were asked to open their classroom windows, even in the middle of winter!), why so many others do not enjoy lack of a library or adequate sports infrastructure, that rooms or complete wings of establishments (when they are not entire schools) continue to be condemned, due to problems of insulation or mould.
The pandemic has of course complicated the government’s task in this matter as in everything else, but it also seems to have upset the order of priorities.
If we rely on the discourse heard in recent months, the main concern seems to have once again become health, as has been the case for all governments for 20 years.
There is a great temptation to subject the health care system to a new reform – or a “refoundation”, as it is called at the CAQ – and it is true that certain aspects of this system deserve to be rethought in depth, such as the how physicians are paid and the chronic weakness of home care.
A silent group
However, it is to be hoped that the next government will not give in to the temptation to determine its priorities according to its electoral interests. Because on this account, it is already certain that education will be relegated far behind.
The problem with education, in fact, is that children and adolescents, unlike other members of society, do not vote and pay taxes, do not respond to surveys and do not participate in discussion groups. , in short, do not constitute a “target clientele”. It is therefore tempting to neglect their interests in favor of more electorally profitable measures, such as tax cuts or the construction of a tunnel.
It takes real political courage to make education the top priority, since a government that goes down this road does not immediately reap the rewards of its efforts.
And we can say that in this matter, courage has unfortunately been lacking for too long, Quebec being at the back of the pack of investments in education on a Canadian scale.2. However, governments that seek not only to win an election, but to make history have no choice but to bet on the future, the very one that François Legault and his coalition proudly claim.
People first
It is not enough to worry about material issues, however important they may be. Because the education network also suffers from a serious human deficit. There is an urgent need to tackle the shortage of teaching staff by allowing holders of a specialized baccalaureate (in history or mathematics, for example) to join the profession for a year of pedagogy, as was done in the past.
Young teachers should be encouraged to remain in the profession (more than a quarter drop out after five years) by offering them more stable working conditions and pairing them with experienced teachers who could act as mentors.
It is also necessary to recruit professionals to provide support services to students in difficulty, avoiding that arbitrary cuts lead to a further loss of expertise and deprive children of the help they need – which has produced during the Couillard years, when many professionals had to go private for lack of work. Finally, the system must be decentralized by giving more power to the schools, in order to promote local initiatives and develop a sense of belonging to the community.
Perhaps it is also appropriate to provide for a law that would guarantee stable and recurring funding for the network, so as to shield it from the electoral moods of the parties. This would be an opportunity to recognize that the amounts invested in education should not be placed in the expenditure column, but in the investment column. Because yes, education is expensive, but ignorance is even more expensive. And in a context of accelerated aging, where there will be fewer and fewer workers to support all services, Quebec can no longer afford to neglect its youth.