Under the title “Alert to organized complacency and academic neglect”, the Idea page of the Homework informed us that MM. Robert Poupart and Jean Gadbois had alerted nothing less than the Québec Ombudsman “to a serious situation which would seriously affect the development of children in our schools”. The authors are concerned that the student is being forced to believe “that he is at the center of his learning and that he is primarily responsible for it”. They conclude that the student “is therefore deprived of the natural and fundamental academic support to which he is entitled”, the teacher being relegated to the role of mediator.
They want to convince us that young people are victims of “blind collusion between the Ministries of Education and Higher Education and the Faculties of Education”. These would promote a harmful approach “resulting from new pedagogies, socio-constructivism, depriving students of important basic knowledge necessary for their learning”. This would produce “diplomas at a discount” responsible for the large number of functional illiterates in Quebec.
How do we learn?
Far from thinking that our education system is perfect, we must vigorously protest against all the anti-pedagogical myths conveyed in this article without any proof. It is shocking to see facts thrown around demagogically as false evidence, misrepresenting decades of research in education and, above all, the hard and constant work of the teaching staff of our schools to “birth spirits”.
We must first strongly affirm an obvious fact that still seems to escape many: the pupil or student is the only one who can learn. No one can do it for him, not even his teachers. Learning takes place through the intellectual activity of the learner. Our two authors are concerned, on the contrary, that “the strategic approach to teaching in primary and secondary schools approved by the ministry is not based on the transmission of knowledge, but on learning support”. The myth of the transmission of knowledge has a hard life.
Socrates proposed, more than 2000 years ago, a pedagogical approach, maieutics, according to which the school system, first and foremost the teacher, must strive “to give birth to, to discover, to reveal the truth in the mind of the learner. The current importance placed on learning support is also the result of decades of work by educational researchers and pedagogical practitioners that it would be wrong to dismiss out of hand. It is not enough to transmit information to the student.
Teaching consists of creating the conditions, environments, activities and providing the resources from which the students will be able to process the information provided by the teacher or by the media or the Internet. They will transform them into knowledge and skills that they will have internalized and constructed.
It is in this context that socioconstructivism is situated, another “bête noire” of misinformed people who seem to believe that nothing is done in schools anymore without a “co-construction accountable to the interaction of students and not as a discourse organized systematically transmitted”. Rest assured, French, mathematics, science, history, geography and the arts are still taught in Quebec schools.
But many experimental studies and meta-analyzes in the science of education have demonstrated the importance of collaborative work between students to facilitate learning, which does not mean that these activities should occupy all the time in class or in training at distance. The exchange of ideas between students is however necessary so that knowledge is refined and built in the minds. It is also through the confrontation of ideas that one learns throughout one’s life.
Knowledge and skills
We like, in some circles, to demonize the competency-based approach. The acquisition of skills would have replaced knowledge in a productivist perspective “by abandoning the ‘whys’ that convey meaning for the ‘hows’ that convey efficiency, consumption and therefore profit”. On the contrary, knowledge will be better learned to the extent that high-level skills are exercised with it. For example, rather than learning the geography of a country by heart, it is preferable to practice your skill in planning a trip in this country according to certain criteria.
At the start of the XXIe century, faced with the exponential growth of available information, the development of skills has become a central objective of education. First and foremost, learning to learn is a skill that can only be developed through learner activity, in interaction with teachers who seek to develop learner autonomy and critical thinking. This becomes vital in distinguishing trustworthy information from the rumors and myths circulating on the networks and, sometimes, as seen here, in the serious media.