Victoire ! At last ! Yes, finally, if there is good news with the abolition of the course in Ethics and Religious Culture (ECR), it is that we will no longer read the nonsense repeatedly repeated about it, especially on its competence. ” religious culture “.
Take a look at what we will no longer hear: “the ECR course and its hidden face: creator of social dissension, propaganda machine at the service of multiculturalism and the ideology of reasonable accommodation, generator of identity confusion of the young generation. , the transmission belt of a rigorous and folkloric religious culture ”, and so on.
Yes, the ECR course would have caused all of this, even though religious culture was taught only a few hours a year in elementary school – if at all! -, ethical competence must also be developed and often take up more space in the classroom. And during these very small hours, according to the anti-ECR, these teachers would have worked hard to show their students to “hate their people”?
All this, yes, even though, at the secondary level, many schools were far from respecting the teaching time recommended by the Quebec Ministry of Education (MEQ) for teaching the ECR course. According to an article by Nancy Bouchard published in The duty, by 2016, almost half of the schools (100 out of 211) had significantly reduced this teaching time; in Montreal, this rate climbed to two-thirds. She adds: “It also appears that schools are officially scheduling this course, but in effect substituting another course for it. So how many of the 250 hours offered in secondary school were really devoted to “bleaching” the identity of students – according to the anti-RCTs? 90, 80, 70? In five years?
Yes, to believe them, the ECR course did all that, while in addition, everything suggests that the majority of teachers who gave this course were not trained in ECR. They too, over time, according to the ECR slayers, would therefore have taken advantage of this course to indoctrinate their students “into fanatic relativism”!
All this while in the same course – the same course! -, duly trained teachers worked to develop ethical competence in their students, that is to say, they instructed them to develop their critical thinking and their autonomy to think, to substantiate their arguments, to avoid fallacies, to distinguish knowledge from belief, to distinguish bad sources of information from good ones, to attack radicalism of all stripes, to condemn all forms of terrorism, etc.
But, very quickly, the ECR course became the scapegoat, the only culprit of the so-called division of values, the adversary of common culture and social cohesion, the architect of “withdrawal into oneself”.
Nadia El-Mabrouk, notorious anti-ECR, even asked a few days ago: “Do you see more social cohesion? Do you see a kind of gathering in common values? Me, I don’t see that, I see more and more division ”- suggesting that it is the course which is responsible for this alleged dislocation. So, would it be the approximately 1,340,000 people aged 8 to 31, who, “bleached” by the ECR course since 2008, would bear the responsibility for this apparent lack of social cohesion in Quebec?
We then shouted haro on the donkey, down with the ECR course! “Nothing but death was capable of atoning for his crime: it was made clear to him. ”
Quebec culture and citizenship: the redeemer
And now, oh miracle, with the recent announcement of the Minister of Education of the creation of a “new” course: Culture and citizenship of Quebec (CCQ), marked by an alleged “change of paradigm”, according to Jean-François Roberge, Quebec will regain its national pride, nothing less!
However, one of the three objectives announced, ethics, dialogue and critical thinking, is a cut-and-paste of what was already done with the ECR course through the competence “Analyze a situation from an ethical point of view”!
However, already in ECR, Quebec culture and its values were put forward, both in ethics and in religious culture!
Thus, apart from the exclusion of religious culture from the CCQ course, one has the impression of witnessing a repositioning of the ECR course for strictly political reasons.
And important questions remain unanswered: who writes the program for the CCQ course? What are their expertise? What will be the skills to be developed and the content elements? How will we assess the ability to “practice Quebec citizenship” or the feeling of national pride? Will the CCQ course impose a “Quebec identity”? How are the so-called Quebec values of gender equality and freedom of expression different from the values of other democratic societies around the world? Will the moralizing approach go hand in hand with the development of critical thinking? Will the course be given under the same conditions as that of ECR - non-respect of the recommended teaching time? Therefore, will the Ministry of Education ensure that all schools and their management respect the hours to be devoted to the new program?
Finally, to conclude, let’s not forget that the new course will not be able to do everything that is expected of it on its own, otherwise it will not become the long awaited Messiah and will probably, again, be led to the gallows.
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