Last week’s debate at HEC Montréal brought up several excellent ideas from the candidates for supporting artists and cultural organizations. However, two factors limit what the Ministry of Culture and the cultural world can do to ensure access to all of our arts. These factors are one, the fact that close to 50% of the population of Quebec is functionally illiterate, and two, that interest in art is a function of the values transmitted by the family.
First factor. Authors and cultural organizations go out of their way to make Quebec literature popular. However, all these efforts are thwarted by the inability of a good part of the population to read their novels. This aspect shows the monumental failure of the school to achieve its basic objective of teaching students to read and write, and also to count. As long as the Ministry of Education has not rectified the situation, cultural stakeholders will be working in a vacuum.
Second factor. Since the first studies of the cultural consumer made in 1959, figures from all industrialized countries show that the composition of theater audiences and museum visitors has been and continues to be in the majority composed of people with university degrees (about two-thirds). All research shows that a taste for the arts of theatre, dance, classical music, opera and the fine arts comes from the value transmitted by the family, family in the extended sense.
In the same way, the value transmitted by the family for higher education is essential in the choice to go to university or not. When parents tell their offspring, consciously or unconsciously, that theater is for educated or wealthy people and not for us, they usually also say that going to CEGEP or university is not necessary, that it is better to learn a trade “like that, we will always have a good job “. The fact that Quebec has fewer university graduates is not because of the cost of education, as some would have us believe, but because of the values that are not transmitted at an early age.
The cultural mediation carried out by most organizations in the arts comes up against this problem of values which complicates their work. We must support them, but education must also become a priority for Quebec and mastery of the French language, first and foremost among teachers, must be a priority. In all subjects, not just French, teachers must correct grammatical and spelling errors. Without government action, whatever it may be, in education, the task of cultural organizations is undermined at the base.
Because if the family doesn’t value higher education, it doesn’t value attending the arts either. Fighting against people who view going to college and attending the arts negatively is, from a mere marketing point of view, the worst challenge. Changing people’s values when they are ingrained in their childhood is often an impossible task. Cultural organizations can help shape a more educated people, but the cultural milieu cannot do it alone.
Note in conclusion that it is wrong to say that citizens do not consume culture, because, on the contrary, 100% of the population consumes it, whether through popular music, films, novels of all kinds, but also the fine arts, festivals and others. The problem stems from the fact that, for popular culture, it is not what is produced by Quebec artists that is consumed in the majority, but what is offered by the large international conglomerates.