In The duty of December 10, Marco Fortier and Anne-Marie Provost testify to a legitimate concern with regard to the failure rates in CEGEP. I add: and yet, the notation is far from being severe. It should not be forgotten that the DEC is not an exam marked anonymously, but that each teacher marks his own students. If there was unanimous and reasonable agreement on the requirements to achieve the 60% mark and if the marking of the scripts was anonymous, the failure rate would be alarming enough to knock out any minister of the Education of his torpor.
Let’s be clear: the present difficulties only partly reflect the drop in level and requirements, because the teachers inevitably “adapt” their grading, not to mention the fact that the pressure of some students to pass does not know comparable decline.
The most common response, the tireless response, the mechanical response to these increasing school difficulties is so-called “pedagogical” assistance. What exactly does it cover, what are its results, what is effective and what is not, it doesn’t matter: it takes more. A student does not work: how to teach him to “organize”? A pupil is regularly absent: how to “motivate” him? A student cheats: how to teach him to “manage his stress”?
But pedagogical help and benevolence are not the only recourses available to us to improve the current situation of the school, in general, and of the CEGEP, in particular.
Welcome the students by promising them that we will help them and by showing our dedication, very good for the front side. But we could also not neglect the tails side, that of authority, which requires students to concentrate, make an effort, work, even deprive themselves, be present, forget themselves in order to open up namely, do not consult their cell phone during class, do not rely on cheating or pressure exerted on the marker to get a passing grade.
For this tail side to be something other than empty talk, for it to produce effects, for it to draw the greatest possible number of students into an atmosphere of work and effort, it takes more than words. , actions are needed, and, I dare say it, yes, I dare: constraints are needed.
Regarding absences, for example, there is an effective solution: make attendance mandatory. It is objected that CEGEP students are autonomous, that “it is up to them to take charge of themselves”. On education, as on many other subjects, the era preferred the modest veil which conceals to the crude truth which hurts. The truth is that among CEGEP students, some are indeed autonomous, but others are not, not yet, and it is these students, often the most fragile academically, who must be helped by the constraint.
It takes courage for an administration, I admit, to decide to help pupils to become autonomous and free by constraint (which went without saying for thinkers as different as Kant, Nietzsche or Hegel has become, we hardly believe it, subversive). But who really cares about CEGEP students, those who give in to the comfortable fashion of “benevolence” or those who, in an almost anarchic context, run the risk of helping students to become autonomous by constraint and to liberate through knowledge?
I will take another example. We can always establish a “contract” with the students at the beginning of the session by banning the cell phone: as Hobbes says, “pacts without the sword [sword] are just words [words] “. Without the sword, without the constraint, the cell phones grow in a class like the trumpets-of-death in autumn. Unless…unless you say that any student caught using their cell phone will be kicked out on the spot. And to keep your word.
You have to be blind not to see the damage of screens — or, let’s say, of their ordinary compulsive use — on children, pupils, students, teachers. And my question comes back: who cares the most about the new generations, those who are apparently benevolent with the students caught in the nets of their cell phones, or those who establish in their class, without any particular taste for the sword but without weakness for all that, the conditions of concentration for all?
I am not suggesting “returning to the old school”. The one I knew spared me neither slaps nor beatings, and I don’t regret her at all. We have made progress in this regard. Fortunately ! But we have regressed in other respects, and we are struggling and slow to recognize it. We equate any constraint with violence. We only pay lip service to effort. These misinterpretations are very expensive for the new generations.