Bill 23 would create, among other things, the National Institute for Excellence in Education. This institute aims in particular to collect information on student success and to establish the best teaching practices to support this success. After a rain of polarized reactions, we have to admit that this bill is not unanimous among researchers who are experts in education.
We have developed our expertise in school settings and through our research on education and teaching students who are said to have an autism spectrum disorder, an intellectual disability or and learning difficulties. In short, with a large number of the approximately 25% of students who are said to be at risk, handicapped or experiencing adjustment and learning difficulties. If we want greater success in Quebec, our reflection must include these students.
From our point of view, these are not just pupils who should be taught more explicitly, but pupils who put the education system in difficulty and who are often blamed for the difficulties they meet at school.
Let’s be honest, is school right for someone in 2023? What is school for today? To pass exams? The flight to the private sector is the symptom with the tones of “save who can” of the better off to avoid an unsatisfactory public school for all: students, parents and teachers. To say that we could, with “evidence” from a certain type of experimental design, determine “effective practices” for everyone and across Quebec is a decoy that we strongly denounce.
No practice can be effective for all students and those that work for a certain number of them, even if they are the majority, necessarily leave others aside. What do we do then?
Irrelevant standards and practices
It must be recognized that a proportion of students generally fail against an established standard that has little to do with learning and educational and academic success. A student who has been diagnosed with dyslexia, who we strive to teach spelling year after year by sending him the obvious message that he is incapable of it, could use his energy to do other rewarding learning. in which he is able to engage. Any sane adult will tell you that it’s a good idea to write on a computer in 2023 and rely on software or other more competent people to write without errors the first time.
And what about the fate of students with intellectual disabilities? Confined to evolving on their own, to developing useless skills in a quasi-prison environment, aren’t they simply victims of an educational system that has never been able to offer them the opportunity to develop anything other than what works for others? Could these students be encouraged to become fulfilled people by focusing first on their strengths, their uniqueness and their interests to contribute to society?
The school includes norms and practices that are relevant only to certain privileged students in certain contexts. They must be able to be questioned since currently, at best, they bore the good students, at worst, they condemn the others to give up early, convinced that they will never be good for anything. And what about their teachers, stuck in perpetual exam preparation, while their students are still learning and developing skills, even if they don’t do it in the same way as everyone else.
Reflecting on academic success, but above all on educational success and the purposes of education, then seems essential because there is no social consensus on the style of human beings that we are helping to educate. It would be a question, by following in the footsteps of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, inspired by Aristotle, of determining by consensus what part to concede toanimal laboransoriented towards productive work for immediate consumption, at thehomo faberwhose know-how and creativity create works that enrich the world in the long term, without forgetting thehomo politicuswho, through concerted action with his peers, takes part in the political life of the city.
A “Parent 2.0 committee”
The current debate hides a much deeper one, and much more interesting! What is educational success? Can academic success in the general education of young people really be differentiated in the interest of our young people and our communities? We say we want to train young people who are open to others and to the world, but what example are we giving them when we set aside before their very eyes, in different ways, students who do not meet the standards of excellence” that we have more or less consciously imposed on ourselves?
Too many young people have difficulty developing in our school system, many others suffer from boredom or performance anxiety. It seems to us that it is time to rethink this limited school system, contemptuous of its students, their parents and their teachers. What if we really aimed for educational and academic success for all?
It is an aim that will not be achieved through the end of the telescope of technocratic prescriptions, but rather through an exploration with all the living forces of education. Thus, an initiative such as a “Parent 2.0 commission” becomes necessary to reaffirm and adapt to our time the founding objectives, namely: that the education system must “give everyone the opportunity to learn; make available to everyone the studies best suited to their aptitudes and tastes; prepare the individual for life in society”. It is also necessary to define the ways and means to be mobilized today to achieve these objectives.