Montreal secondary schools | More and more homogeneous

Many of Montreal’s secondary schools that are described as multi-ethnic today are increasingly homogeneous, with a clearly predominant ethnic group. The ideal of diversity is declining, with young first and second generation immigrants ultimately rubbing shoulders with few Quebecers who have been here for a long time.

Well ahead of French or any other language, Arabic is the language of the greatest number of students in Montreal secondary schools Pierre-Laporte, Émile-Legault and Antoine-de-Saint-Exupéry. At Collège Saint-Louis – a public school in Lachine which offers the international education program to strong students, by selection – 140 mothers of students were born in Quebec, but 251 were born in China. Quebecers with French as their mother tongue, conversely, are in the large majority in several private schools in the metropolis.

This is what emerges from Sociocultural portrait of students enrolled in Montreal public schools of the School Tax Management Committee, as well as ministerial data on the mother tongue of students enrolled in private schools.

“Bill 101 is a success from a linguistic point of view. First or second generation young people speak French very well,” estimates André Bouchard, a recently retired teacher, after 32 years in secondary school.

On the other hand, when it comes to culture, Quebec does not succeed in making people love its culture, because young first or second generation immigrants often have “very little contact with the host society”.

Before his eyes, he saw the evolution of his neighborhood which was transposed into the classroom. At the start of his career, he taught mainly young people of Italian ancestry. These families moved elsewhere, and the neighborhood, now called Le Petit Maghreb, mainly attracts families from northern Africa.

“Migration flows change the composition of the neighborhood and, therefore, of the school,” observes Mr. Bouchard. Added to this is the fact that a large number of native Quebecers are leaving for private schools. »

Thus, at Pierre-Laporte secondary school in Mont-Royal, three times as many students have Arabic as their mother tongue than French. At Émile-Legault, one of the two pavilions of Saint-Laurent secondary school, 427 students have Arabic as their mother tongue (257 for French).

Conversely, Collège Notre-Dame, a private secondary school, has 66.8% of students whose mother tongue is French. The Collège de Montréal has 73.2%. And this, while on the island of Montreal, this proportion is only 38.6%.

Effects of “ethnic and social class logics”

According to Maryse Potvin, professor of sociology of education at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), there is no doubt. “There is a flight of parents from certain neighborhoods to private schools based on ethnic and social class logic,” she explains.

“The exodus to private schools” means that Francophones are less and less present in public secondary schools. Those who are still there find themselves in a unique position: the majority in society, the minority on a daily basis, in their school.

Marie*, whose daughter attends one of these schools with a strong predominance of a cultural community, notes that in their case, this is experienced well, with a certain adaptation. When someone like Karl Tremblay dies, she relates, it doesn’t have much resonance.

Also, she emphasizes, the codes are not the same for invitations to the house. With friends, in primary school, it was done without ceremony, she explains. In secondary school, “the parents first want to meet us, have coffee with us. They don’t send their children to visit us like that, without knowing us first.”

The risk of “fantasized representations of the other”

Paul Eid, professor of sociology at UQAM specializing in questions of immigration and identity, observes that young people who find themselves “in a school without any diversity” or those who attend one “where they have no no contact with Quebecers [de souche] » are, both of them, at risk of falling into a “fantasy representation of the other” and into “received ideas imbued with prejudice”.

Maryse Potvin indicates that studies have already “shown that in Quebec schools where there are two or three groups which dominate in number, the climate is often more polarized than in very multi-ethnic schools, where French becomes the common language [dans ces établissements] “.

A high concentration of a group of a given origin “poses two important problems,” indicates psychologist Rachida Azdouz, researcher at the Intercultural Relations Research Laboratory at the University of Montreal. “There is a risk of falling back on one’s original group, by default, and an insufficient ratio of hosts to allow meaningful interaction between hosts and guests. »

The Internet also allows young people to stay connected to their country of origin or that of their parents. This has the advantage of preventing people from elsewhere “from having a double or multiple identity”, “without feeling torn and forced to choose”.

But this can at the same time be “a source of tension and withdrawal into identity, particularly in the current context marked by polarization and sectarianism”.

* This interlocutor asked to testify anonymously to avoid reprisals against her daughter.