The law stipulates that a citizen must make a report if he witnesses a serious situation that has an impact on the development of a child. We believe that this is currently the case for the children who attend our schools. This is why today we are writing to the Québec Ombudsman a letter that we are also sharing with the readers of the Homework.
Quebec children are systematically deprived of an excessively large number of tools that would allow them one day to fully play their role as citizens. In doing so, their role is reduced to their productivity by confining them to that of consumers.
Here are the shortcomings we are witnessing.
A trend emerging from new pedagogies, socio-constructivism, deprives students of important basic knowledge that is nevertheless necessary for their learning. This “strategic approach to primary and secondary education (DSEPS)”, adopted in accordance with the program of the Ministry of Education, “is not based on the transmission of knowledge (notions), but on assistance in ‘learning’, we read in against reform. The ideological drift of the Quebec education system by Normand Baillargeon, at the Presses de l’Université de Montréal (PUM).
The pupil, who is compelled to believe “that he is at the center of his learning and that he is primarily responsible for it”, is therefore deprived of the natural and fundamental academic support to which he is entitled.
Making the student vulnerable in this way by inflating his own ego creates a harmful illusion and excessive pressure (resulting in anxiety, insecurity, etc.) which harms his affective and cognitive development.
The teacher relegated to the role of “mediator”, in a “skills-based approach”, distorts the knowledge thus conceived as a company of “co-construction”, indebted to the interaction of the students among themselves and not as an organized discourse which must be systematically transmitted by explicit and integrated teaching before being criticized and developed.
Thus dispossessed by the confiscation of the role of the teacher as transmitter of knowledge and culture in favor of a watered down role of “animator”, the school, paradoxically, gags the pupils in their quest to become themselves authors of their lives and their happiness.
Academics and civil servants, sorcerer’s apprentices in the “sciences” of education, rely on each other to establish the legitimacy of this strongly ideologized pedagogical vision which voluntarily and energetically takes over public education and which perverts the duty to adequately train students and teachers.
The cultural misery and intellectual poverty to which this pedagogism confines the students are only equaled by the blind collusion between the Ministries of Education and Higher Education and the faculties of education. This clearly appears to be a form of voluntary and systematic complacency that has bordered on “insider trading” for more than 25 years, without any obligation to render accounts.
In order to remain in the shadows, this complacent collusion necessarily results in the automatic promotion of students, the exclusion of repetition, the fiddling of grades and the simulacrum of an empty graduation that no longer even deceives the students. More and more of them understand that they have been neither in the school of knowledge nor in that of effort, they prefer dropping out to failure. Unless they become the first users of ChatGPT and serve quite naturally as a relay between the intrusion of ICT (information and communication technologies) and a pedagogy of the utility which evacuates knowledge for itself as much as the master.
They and they will reproach us tomorrow for having pampered their “self-esteem” instead of having confronted them with tough demands. Discounted diplomas, successive reductions in the level of requirements and content, multiple reforms and the spoliation of the role of teacher are dragging down faculties of education, their professors and their graduates.
The artificially inflated success quotas give us cohorts deprived of knowledge and culture, but “certified” and hired to go to school. A school that is complicit in negligence by abandoning meaningful “whys” for “hows” that convey efficiency, consumption and therefore profits.
To top it off, and since the reform launched in 1999-2000, 1400 education officials and 16 ministers in 20 years will have produced 27% of functional illiterates among university graduates and almost 48% in the population of Quebec. Literacy, literacy and numeracy, of which they are hostages, have suffered for more than 20 years.
These elements bear witness to a serious situation that has an impact on the development of our children and on the future of Québec. We therefore respectfully report them to you and hope that you will be able to take the necessary measures.
This is a cry for help that it would be irresponsible to ignore.