In the letter that I sent to you last November, Mr. Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, and that The duty published, I invited you to think about Quebec schools in the long term, well beyond what I called electoral myopia. You have since chosen the short term, “the field”, you say. I would have expected your land to go beyond the schoolyard and open onto the Quebec of tomorrow. But that was not the case, at least for the most part.
You know that the depth of field, as we say in photography, of a field limited to the schoolyard is so reduced there that anything beyond four years becomes blurry, imprecise and uninteresting. . That’s why most of the seven priorities you recently announced are, to me, patching and mending.
All of your predecessors also had schools to repair, wanted to promote French and vocational training and make the school network more efficient. And what did they do with it? And I will not speak here of the maintenance of the abominable particular projects on which I have already told you my way of thinking.
In my opinion, only one of the measures you are proposing passes the test of a longer-term vision of the school, namely that of “classroom assistants” to assist the primary school teacher. I would put two. One recruited among trainees already in teacher training, the other among candidates for admission to training, who would be required to be able to demonstrate at least one experience of educational activities, as monitors recreation, scouting, daycare, etc. To this help, I would also add remedial specialists attached to each primary school, and not passing through occasionally.
This formula of assistance to the holder makes it possible to intervene as soon as a pupil experiences any difficulty and to settle it before it is too late, while leaving the holder in the wheelhouse of the whole class. In Finland, this formula has been used for some years and is closely associated with an incredible dropout rate of 5% after nine years of compulsory education. This appealing rate should encourage you to try the experiment.
Did you know that there is already a similar formula in Quebec that allows students to have more than one adult in class? It is the experience of the CFERs, which has only one flaw which, moreover, has nothing to do with the formula itself, developed in Victoriaville by the team of Normand Maurice, a great teacher who died prematurely.
This business school formula is aimed at students of secondary school age who are already struggling with very serious learning difficulties. It therefore comes a little too late in the school career. But for these students, it’s still a balm. Taking advantage of the reduced ratios of special education, the teachers have rearranged their task into a “global task”, so that, when they are not teaching, they remain in class at the disposal of the pupils as soon as a problem arises. difficulty.
Assessment
And since it’s never too late to do the right thing, I would withdraw the priority that concerns specific projects and I would replace it with a measure that would have the effect of bringing us closer to the project of building a real basic school. It would be a question of eliminating from the primary course the quantified evaluation to replace it by a qualitative educational evaluation centered on the evolution and the progress of the pupil himself, and not on his position in terms of performance in relation to his friends.
Currently, the numerical evaluation only serves to situate the student in relation to his peers. I would be willing to bet big that serious research would show that in the long term, numerical assessment even has harmful effects on the student. For example, that of stigmatizing the student once and for all either by propelling him to the rank of “bolé”, or by hanging around his neck the status of “pocket”. He then surfs until secondary school on an infernal algorithm known to all and which will make him stumble over the selection of particular projects with all the possible disastrous consequences on self-esteem and confidence.
It’s the reverse Pygmalion effect: the “pocket” student behaves according to the image his teachers have of him. And this image, it comes from numerical evaluations which, by dint of accumulating, become predictive of future failures. This system of redundancy continues, I call it the dog chasing its tail!
In closing, I would like to reiterate my offer to you for a one-on-one in a discreet little café where we could discuss what school represents for the future of this Quebec that we love so much.