More than a year has passed since the announcement of the replacement of the Ethics and Religious Culture (ECR) course with a Quebec Culture and Citizenship (CCQ) course, but for now, we are still in the waiting for concrete changes for our children.
If we are to believe the information that leaked before the holidays, the new course is far from ready and some unions are even asking to postpone its implementation for another year. However, there is an urgent need to reform this antiquated, inappropriate course, which propagates stereotypes and divides students, and we expect the Minister of Education Bernard Drainville to make it a priority.
But beyond questions of time and teacher training, what about the program itself? What progress should we expect? Our analysis that follows is based on CCQ’s provisional program made public last fall.
Less religious culture… but the same orientation
Remember that ECR has raised countless criticisms since its creation, mainly because it gives a large place to religions, without critical analysis, and exerts pressure on students to identify themselves through affiliations and practices. nuns. Furthermore, ECR is at odds with the State Secularism Act (Law 21).
According to the government’s announcement, the new CCQ course will rely on critical thinking, dialogue and the promotion of a common Quebec citizenship that transcends religious affiliations. These are great goals! But what about the facts?
By consulting the provisional program, we note that the religious culture which occupied a preponderant place in ECR is no longer stated as a competency in the new course, but becomes one subject among others. This is indeed a major change that should make it possible to avoid, or at least reduce, the stigmatization of people through religious identities and practices.
But then ? How to gather? How to define a common Quebec citizen identity? Unfortunately, the provisional program remains very vague on these questions, which are nevertheless crucial in the context of a citizenship course.
And the elephant in the room is the almost total absence of state secularism. Apart from two or three appearances as indicative examples, secularism is conspicuous by its absence.
But then what will prevent us from continuing to promote so-called “open” secularism in the course, in other words the multiculturalist concept of managing religious diversity interpreting religious freedom as the absolute freedom to practice and even promote one’s religion? , in any place and in any circumstance? Currently, the explicit or implicit message transmitted to young people through the ECR course is that Bill 21 would be racist and Islamophobic. How will this change if we give no indication of the mode of management of living together advocated in the new course?
Freedom of expression under surveillance
Moreover, it will be recalled that the new course was announced in the fall of 2021 at a time when the censorship of literary works, the banning of the utterance of certain words and the obstacles to academic freedom – reaching their climax with the case Lieutenant-Duval at the University of Ottawa – were in full swing. Jean-François Roberge then insisted on the importance of defending freedom of expression and equipping young people to enable them to argue with respect. Very good, but concretely, how to achieve it?
Despite some warnings against censorship and indoctrination, the risks of slippage are numerous in the provisional program of the new course. How to address themes related to religious affiliations, gender identity, racism, without falling into the prevailing ideological dogmatism?
For example, in the theme “Social groups and power relations”, we can read the concepts “racism, colonialism, feminism, decolonialism, LGBTQ+ movement”, etc. What feminism will it be? What anti-racism? Which LGBTQ+ struggles? In this era marked by excesses, will we choose the vision of the most militant and radical groups of each camp?
Theories that can divide
As much as Marxism was the preponderant doctrine in the 1970s, today it is sociological theories dominated by the unscientific concept of “human race” that are in vogue. The whole history of Western civilization is thus reviewed under the prism of the domination of the “white race”, imperialism, colonialism, racism. And these new theories enjoy a status of untouchability and absolute truth. Just like with religions. This is certainly not what will make it possible to develop the critical sense of young people or to create the feeling of a common Quebec citizenship. On the contrary, it is communitarianism, division, and racism that we feed.
Rather than crystallizing beliefs, religious, “racial” or “gender” affiliations and dividing young people into as many identity groups, the role of the school is on the contrary to bring people together, to create commonality, but also to consider all young people equally, not as members of communities, but as individuals, on a universal basis.
All this arduous exercise in redesigning ECR should not have served, in the end, only to replace one dogmatism by another, one religion by another. The only way to reverse the trend is to clearly state the model of state secularism and the principles that underpin it in the curriculum of the new course.