On this Valentine’s Day, we will talk a lot about love, everywhere. Today, I want to ask you all to join me in declaiming your deep, sincere and unwavering love for public schools.
School is the most beautiful place in the world. A place where young minds are formed, where miracles happen every day. A fabulous place where passions develop, interests manifest themselves, where often we begin to glimpse the traces that our young people will then follow all their lives. It is a place of awakening, of learning, of life. A beacon for some, a refuge for others, an anchor for young souls adrift or a hook for those who need to anchor themselves to something greater.
Public school is a place of sharing, of mutual aid, a great agora where everyone is welcome, whatever their origin, fortune, kinship, interests, abilities, style, birth, gifts or disorders. The public school could be a small oasis of harmonious utopia in an increasingly atomized, harsh and violent world.
But my heart hurts, too, because I see this marvelous institution being abused, for several years, by forces which try to weaken it, to subordinate it to mercantile, industrial or commercial interests, to pervert its mission of awakening to make it utilitarian, a beast forging the worker’s machine.
I see the people who work there losing more and more strength. I see them kowtow, weakened and exhausted by a succession of botched reforms, savage cuts, promises never realized by a political class that declaims fine words without ever taking the most courageous actions. And I see unfortunately that it is the students who suffer from these government actions or inactions, which weaken from year to year a little more the place where they spend most of their time.
Our public school is becoming grey, dull and rickety. It breaks my heart, because I love him so much.
How can we treat something so dear to our hearts, which is as fundamental as our schools and centres?
This is why the Independent Federation of Education exists, why we are demanding, why we are currently negotiating with the Treasury Board and the Minister of Education. So that we can give our public school the love it deserves. We teachers know it, our public school, and we know what it needs to grow. We also know that by giving schools the chance to flourish, it is also to all students that we give a chance to flourish. To grow up. To become the humans who will change the world tomorrow.
If we want to be able to take better care of our students, we need to have smaller and better adapted classes, we need classes and schools in good condition, we need to be treated and recognized at our fair value, we need our profession to be valued concretely, not just by fine words in speeches. All of that is good for the teachers, but it’s also good for the students and, ultimately, for Quebec society as a whole.
Our students, young people and adults, need love, our schools and our centers need love, the public school needs love. We love him and we will never stop loving him, but we teachers need help. In the government we want to say that we have solutions to offer and that, if he likes public schools as much as we do, he knows what he has to do.