Banana peels are piling up on the road to the new Culture and Quebec Citizenship (CCQ) course, which is already slipping, even before its preliminary drafting, into the contours of the announced disaster. When political stubbornness wins out over reason, logic and educational benefit, we get bogged down. We are witnessing a real instrumentalization of education.
The CAQ team cannot plead the astonishment at the negative reaction aroused by the CCQ course, which will replace Ethics and Religious Culture (ECR) in the fall of 2023. The government has multiplied the missteps and mingled his partisan wands in an operation that normally should stand out the most. We don’t mess around with the primary and secondary school curriculum. It must respond only to the training imperatives of young Quebecers, and not to a political program. Governments pass; the courses are here for good.
There are many reasons to be concerned about how this new course is being propelled. It is difficult at first to find the common thread that unites the eight themes on the menu; taken in isolation, they all have their own interests, but under what hat are they really united? The Minister of Education, Jean-François Roberge, replies that it is to equip children, so that they are “ready to exercise. [leur] role in today’s Quebec ”. The question is not trivial: is the school used to train minds, citizens or workers? Depending on the answer, the school program can take three paths: general culture, the guide of the perfect citizen or utilitarianism.
Of course, the school must “be of its time”. The CCQ course is almost one more step towards the deconfessionalization of our school network. It was one of the major projects of the Estates General on education (1995-1996), and Mr.me Pauline Marois, then Minister of Education, opened an important breach in 1998 with the advent of linguistic school boards, in place of Catholic and Protestant entities. In 2005, the ECR course erased all confessional residue and eliminated optional courses in ethics and religious education. Since 2008, the ECR course has been compulsory for the 1D year to 5e secondary, but its “religious culture” component remained a real irritant. In line with the secularism of the State with which the CAQ works – and we are grateful to it – this course remained a shadow on the program.
However, should we rush the preparation and implementation of CCQ as if we wanted to tie this course for the perfect little citizen to an election date? It is not insignificant that even within the teams responsible for devising the said program, there is immense discomfort. Our education reporter Marco Fortier reported this week that “two of the five members of the program’s editorial board recently resigned” and that “experts from another committee, responsible for“ validating ”the content, are considering to resign in their turn in front of the turn considered “partisan” of the establishment of the course ”. It smells very bad.
Last January, an important advisory body, the Higher Education Council, published a writing detailing the amount of significant “risks” attached to the hasty implementation of this new course with its poorly defined identity, starting with the unrealism of its implementation date. He points out the eclecticism of the subjects on the program, the risk of entanglement with subjects already taught, the importance of carrying out a real ECR assessment before embarking on a novelty, the inability of universities to adjust their teacher training program in time for the launch, the need for specialized resources for certain components (sexuality education and legal framework, for example) and the lack of training and preparation associated with a disaster-launched operation.
But he also warns against a trend observed in the literature on education towards the multiplication of “educations in” (sexuality, digital citizenship, citizen participation, etc.), which rub shoulders at school with more traditional disciplinary knowledge. (French, math, history). In short, don’t these “educations in” force the school to adopt a posture in which it is not comfortable? He is literally asked to “respond to the social and cultural phenomena of the times which are part of a non-consensual reading of the world”. This is what sounds like a disaster call.
So here is a project that promises to be complex and doomed to failure if Quebec does not try to catch up. Why not have imagined a compulsory philosophy course at the 1D year to 5e secondary? There are in this matter all the bases for the formation of enlightened spirits.