In The Press of January 12, an article evokes the experience of students from Saint-Luc school who wish to tackle the protection of natural environments, in particular that of the Magpie River1. A few weeks ago, Marie Maltais and Olivier Cloutier, two students from Mont-Saint-Sacrement school, were talked about for having surveyed several hundred elementary and secondary students about the place that they would like the environment to take over at school.
These young people and many others wish to feed the discussion and maintain the debate around the values to be preserved and the actions to be taken to counter climate change and protect “our” environment.
We have heard that a partial reform of the secondary science and technology curriculum is underway.
Although it seems impossible to obtain information on the orientation that this revised program will take, we express the wish that a larger and better structured place be given to scientific content relating to environmental and climate issues.
Currently, science and technology programs contain notions related to ecology and are partly organized around environmental issues that serve to contextualize many notions around this theme. The Social Universe programs (in geography and the contemporary world, in particular) and Ethics and Religious Culture (soon to be replaced by the Culture and Citizenship program in Quebec) require students to deal with social, economic or ethical issues relating to the environment. In addition, the general area of training “environment and consumption” aims to enable young people to reflect on this issue in order to develop a critical and well-founded point of view.
Complex issues
Despite this, as Marie Maltais, Olivier Cloutier and many other students have named, environmental and climate issues remain relatively unaddressed in Quebec schools and when they are, the complexity of the issues is too often erased. Indeed, environmental and climate issues are eminently complex. They benefit from being treated in a global and interdisciplinary manner.
Currently, by distributing the study of concepts and issues between different disciplines, we divide them artificially. They are treated on the surface without managing to properly articulate the elements studied. We then lose the complexity and the overall vision of these questions by sprinkling concepts in different subjects, by encouraging small individual gestures and by using the environment and climate change as a context to study something else.
This is what Marie Maltais and Olivier Cloutier criticize their training for: that climate change has been addressed briefly, without depth and without taking the measure of the challenges that await us.
They add that current content, which has become derisory in the eyes of young people, is addressed with a view to passing the ministerial exam: learning for evaluation has become the educational culture of Quebec… which is nothing less than scandalous.
What do our young people want? First, they wish to participate in debates relating to the fight against climate change and the preservation of the environment. They want to be able to take social action to change things. Even more, they demand an education that addresses complex issues, and want to be led to examine them based on recent scientific knowledge, on the one hand, and democratic values, on the other. They are, in fact, calling for an education system that is capable of tackling environmental and climate issues head-on. Not to pass exams and make the Quebec education system look good, but to be truly “educated” about the environment and climate change. From our point of view, they are absolutely right and it is high time to listen to them.