The news still reports, these days, the poor quality of written French among college students. Having myself taught at college, I can testify to the extreme difficulty that I have already had in deciphering the texts of several students.
These observations always bring me back to my parents. My parents, aged 84 and 85, write without spelling mistakes. They both have a primary education, having never had the chance to continue their studies in the Quebec of the 1940s. My mother was educated by nuns in a school in the Centre-Sud of Montreal. My father was educated in a rural multi-level one-room school. And, I repeat, they write quite understandable and correctly structured texts without fail. Ah yes, they also read, Memoirs of General de Gaulle, The pillars of the earth, things like that… In short, “something”, in the methods of the 1940s, worked in the teaching of French. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to go back to the “good old days” at all. No thanks ! Very little for me the authoritarianism of the teachers, the blows of the ruler on the fingers of left-handed people, the notebooks publicly handed out in descending order of grade or the little catechism, among other bad memories of those years. But all the same, “something” worked, since we were taught to read and write correctly in six years. But what is this “something” that worked and was lost along the way? Maybe we should find it…
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