The issue of general education at CEGEP is no less fundamental for Quebec than that of secularism. The problem is also posed in comparable terms: should we imitate the Anglophone system or maintain our Francophone specificity?
For the Fédération étudiante collégiale du Québec, the boredom of many students in literature and philosophy would justify a reform that would diversify courses in the manner of humanities English colleges. Many professors responded to this proposal on March 9 with a letter which insists on the idea that the transmission of a common classical heritage is at the heart of the French-speaking tradition.
In an article of March 14, also in The duty, Nicolas Bertrand contests this letter and defends the idea of a general education made up of diversified courses between which the students would have the choice. His argument is that in reality, CEGEP philosophy courses are almost as diverse as humanities, the professors not agreeing on the authors and on the notions to be taught. Why then reduce CEGEP courses to the sole field of philosophy and not have students choose in order to stimulate their motivation?
Although I signed the letter of March 9, I consider that this objection deserves our attention. There is something true in these remarks, which literature and philosophy teachers rarely dare to look in the face: everyone, in their classes, does more or less what they want, so that where some teach classic authors and address the points of the program, others do not do so, opting for easier authors, supposed to “please” the students more. Let us not be unduly surprised: in a situation where there is no control, freedom degenerates into arbitrariness.
However, I am far from thinking that such anarchy is an argument in favor of humanities. It is, in fact, exactly the opposite. The problem with general training is that it does not keep its promises: a classic and common training for all. The specificity of French-speaking education lies entirely in this formula of Péguy: “Homère is new this morning, and nothing is perhaps older than today’s newspaper”.
The classics, that is to say, in the Latin sense, first-class authors, by allowing us to break with immediate news, habits and fashions, open us up to another world and thus make us grasp both what remains permanent in ours and touches our deep humanity, and what makes it unique, escapes those who remain prisoners of the present. We have already largely deprived the new generations of this heritage, literature and philosophy in CEGEP, that’s about all we have left.
How to be faithful to the spirit of French-speaking education and avoid the current anarchy? It is claimed that we cannot agree on go-to authors. It is to invent a false problem to justify in advance the abandonment of our specificity and the imitation of English-speaking colleges. Nothing is easier, in fact, than to draw up a list of classical authors between whom teachers would have the freedom to choose: one can stop at Plato, the other at Aristotle, but one and the other will agree to put these two authors on the first-class list.
The difficulty will therefore not be to agree on a reasonable list of authors and classical notions, but to ensure that each teacher draws his main orientation from it so that all CEGEP students have access to what is universally recognized as the highest and most admirable. I have no a priori ideas on how this control could be exercised (by anonymously corrected exams?), what I do know is that the current anarchy will not be favorable, in years to come, to literature and philosophy.
There remains the problem of student motivation. A general remark first: we should not forget, even if the idea is unpleasant for many, that the cultivated man takes pleasure where the uncultivated man is bored (just as the latter takes pleasure where the first gets bored). Many students arrive at CEGEP with alarming shortcomings, especially in French, and are bored where others take pleasure (knowing that there is also pleasure in effort, as lazy people do not know). .
The gap between pupils has become so considerable that it will be necessary, one day or another, to build less heterogeneous classes. This would not mean depriving weaker students of classical authors, but approaching them at a slower pace.
We will not save general education by remaining deaf to criticism, but by responding to it while remaining true to ourselves.