Homeschooling | Families sue Quebec

With the help of lawyer Anne-France Goldwater, nearly 2,000 homeschooling families will try next week to have the court strike down a regulation that since this year has forced their children to take compulsory exams in the Ministry of Education at the end of the year.

Tristan Peloquin
The Press

The lawsuit is financed by the member families of the Association québécoise pour l’éducation à domicile (AQED), a group which claims to represent a total of approximately 4,000 of the approximately 10,000 children who are homeschooled. She affirms that the obligation for these children to undergo the ministerial tests is “an antidemocratic attack on the educational freedom of the parents”, which “empties of its substance all the interest of education at home”.

In interview with The PressM^e Goldwater, who is leading the action, argued that children who are homeschooled receive “on average” a better quality education than those who attend public schools.

In Quebec, the Education Act public allows children who receive “appropriate education” at home to be exempted from school attendance. However, regulatory reforms introduced by the Legault government now oblige all children who are home schooled, at a level equivalent to 4^e and 6^e years, as well as 2^e4^e and 5^e secondary school, to take the Ministry’s compulsory end-of-year exams. The results of the first cohort that had to take these exams last June have not yet been made public by the government.

Unfair Penalties and “Irreparable Harm”

According to the prosecution, these compulsory examinations particularly penalize children aged 4^e and 5^e secondary by imposing on them “significant anxiety and stress due to the fact that the mark obtained in the ministerial test will constitute [100 % de leur] final grade, even though it only accounts for 50% of the overall grade of students attending the school.

The AQED also pleads that “more than 50% of home-schooled children have learning disabilities or physical or mental health problems that the public education system cannot respond to adequately”. If they fail the compulsory exams, these children can theoretically be forced to return to school. This would expose them to “irreparable harm,” because these “schools are not provided with the resources to support their education,” the lawsuit claims.

M^e Goldwater, who herself went to public school in Outremont as a child, says her elementary education was “a disaster.” “I had learned to read at 3 years old, do you think that I was going to learn in kindergarten and in first year to draw like little babies in a cradle? she asks.

The fiery lawyer recognizes that some parents do not have the skills to teach their children a sufficiently strong course at home. But for these cases, she maintains, the portfolios which are already required by the Ministry of Education, twice a year, to testify to the progress of the child are sufficient to intercept the cases of educational deficiencies.

M^e Goldwater claims that during the pandemic, her own granddaughters were educated at her law firm, by two teachers — “one English and one French” — whom she hired for a full year following the closure of schools. schools. “When a parent does the same thing at home, the child doesn’t have to spend the whole day at school. You know, the purpose of public school is also to allow parents to go to work, ”says the lawyer.

Her granddaughters, she says, now attend a public school in Westmount. “They are not private, because I also have the concern that they do not frequent only the rich and that they know the real world”, says M^e Goldwater.