In The way to school (Leméac), I said that “I was lucky not to be trained by pedagogues”, having attended for three years a one-room school in which about twenty pupils from the first to the seventh year ate at the same table, each according to his appetite, the few dishes well prepared by a brave country girl: French (rhymes in support: “never on a vu-uu, never we will see-aa, a little mouse-ii in a cat’s ear-aa”), calculation (sometimes apples, sometimes cherries), geography (remember that the Earth is round even if it is flat on the world map and under your feet), history (which was forgotten in favor of the trees and fields all around) and the little catechism (good and evil, God invisible, but everywhere).
Afterwards, it was, in the village, the school of the brothers who took up the same subjects by adding sport, then the classical course, where the teachers had no professional training, but continued to learn passionately what they taught. . Émilie and her peers, who had not taken any course “in science and technology didactics, nor in the social universe, […] psychology of preschool and primary-aged children, philosophy and the foundations of education” (“The return of Émilie Bordeleau to our schools?” in The duty of April 5), led me, who did not like school, to university, where I ended up teaching.
And how to explain that my parents, trained by other Emilies and who had just finished their sixth year, could write these rare letters that I reread sometimes, quite surprised to find no spelling or syntax error?
For years, we have deplored the poor quality of written French, the increase in the dropout rate, the shortage of teachers; we multiply the reforms, by consulting the “sciences of education”, and no one or almost no one dares to ask the question: is it possible that this explains that, that the replacement of Émilie by specialists in education explains largely the ignorance of the pupils? As Lise Bissonnette writes, “20 years of reform to achieve a mastery of French that is lower than it has always been” (InterviewsBoreal).
How can we teach what we don’t know, don’t master? How to explain, for example, that at university students in education could not follow a simple introductory course in Quebec literature, that we had to create for them and them a lighter version of this course? The answer is simple: these students, lost in the field of cognitive sciences, did not have enough time to devote to the study of basic subjects.
Normand Baillargeon, a cultivated philosopher to whom we owe a sustained and in-depth reflection on the education system, believes that we are not relying on good evidence from the sciences of education; it may be, I ask to be convinced. If ever we create, as he claims, a second Parent commission, we will not have to review the objectives of democratizing education, but in one way or another “the professionalization of teaching” which accompanied that this and which was harmful to him. How not to judge the tree by its fruits? “The results are obvious,” writes Christian Rioux. But our experts persist in seeing nothing. For that, it would be necessary to dislodge the ideology which reigns supreme in the sciences of education” (“Le temps des assessments” in The duty of March 17).
We should also review our conception of education, of which teachers and students are victims, which favors quantity to the detriment of quality, speed rather than slowness: learn everything and very quickly so that it does not cost too much and that we leave time to think about what this world could be like if we stopped squeezing it like a lemon.
Shaped heads rather than full ones, smaller classes and lighter tasks so that teachers and students can learn to move freely between words and things, between school and the world of which they feel little little responsible. “Education is the point where we decide whether we love the world enough to take responsibility for it” (Arendt).
For the teacher to be able to assume this task, it would take “basic studies, very simple, where the child would learn that he exists within the universe […] we would teach him enough of the past for him to feel connected to the men who preceded him […] we would try to familiarize him with both books and things […] we would give him simple notions of morality […] “. Émilie, without having read Yourcenar, responded to the latter’s educational program and corresponded well to the image of the being that the specialty, says Einstein, has not yet “transformed into a usable machine”: someone who ” acquires a feeling, a practical sense of what is worth undertaking, what is beautiful, what is morally right”.
I know it well, the world has changed, but when the pedagogues will in turn be replaced by real robots, we may have to remember Émilie.