Apparently discouraged by an alarming failure rate, the Association of French Teachers (AQPF) proposed to the Minister of Education a simplification of the past participle agreement.
I don’t know how Bernard Drainville reacted to this false good suggestion. But for several years now, his ministry has tried to hide the disastrous results in French by encouraging very lax correction. To the point of sometimes pushing the cork a little far. I had been very surprised to learn, last year, that certain correctors accepted “pain” to designate the tree which is called “pine”. I will be told that there is, after all, only a small “a” of difference. But all the same; the tree is much more difficult to digest. I had then suggested that we also accept “fairy accounts”, alleging that it would thus be easier to reach the count, that is to say the passing grade.
Despite these corrections, let’s admit it very creatively, we continued to fail in our dilapidated schools. “We put 20 years of effort to improve things and things are stagnating,” recognized Bernard Tremblay, CEO of the Fédération des cégeps. In secondary school, the situation is no better. Hence no doubt this idea of simplifying the agreement of the past participle.
It is said that Catherine de Medici brought to the court of France, in addition to her cooks, the agreement of the past participle. While the former have greatly contributed to enriching French gastronomy, the latter has ruined the lives of many schoolchildren, especially since the French have made the rule more complex. It’s to lose his Latin or rather, his French. Should we therefore simplify the agreement?
Behind this question, and the answer that the AQPF brings to it, there are one or two myths that bother me. The first is that if young Quebecers do so poorly in French, it’s because our language is too difficult.
This idea is not new. 40 years ago, one of my sons-in-law came home from school saying that French, according to his teacher, was more difficult than Mandarin. As a motivational speech to make people love our language, there is better!
In fact, there is no easy language, except perhaps Esperanto, a language created from scratch and spoken nowhere. Let me quote Yvon Pantalacci, author of the site Sharing Francophonie “What about Japanese, its three verbal forms and its three writing systems, Chinese, its 20,000 characters and its wide variety of tones, nine for Cantonese and four for Mandarin or, to put it mildly? stick only to European languages, Spanish, its irregular verbs and its doubled “r”, which are particularly difficult if not impossible to reproduce, and German, its compound words, its declensions or even its three genders? He could have added Italian, whose agreement in gender and number is so complicated that it makes French seem almost simple.
As I have written many times, our language is difficult, but it is not impossible to learn. As proof: tens of millions of people manage to master it, and often very well, for generations, even centuries, moreover, almost everywhere in the world.
English, a complex language
The second myth is the corollary of the first: English is easy. This is false, totally false! It’s not me who says it, but the great linguist Claude Hagège, who knows a hundred languages and speaks about thirty. “English, he says, is much more difficult than French. Yet, he adds, this language has never been reformed.
The Psychologue.net site presents English as the irregular language par excellence. So much so that the rate of dyslexia is higher among English speakers than among speakers of other European languages. No wonder when you learn that there are 1120 ways to write the sounds of English. By comparison, Italian only needs 33 graphemes to render its 25 sounds.
In short, the supposed decline of French has nothing to do with its alleged difficulty. As the popularity of English has nothing to do with its apparent fluency.
One last element bothers me, and to my knowledge no one has spoken about it. The reform proposed by the Association is in practice impossible to carry out. For what ? Because French does not belong to us.
It is a treasure that we share with 321 million French speakers, according to the Observatory of the French language. Those of French-speaking Europe, of course. But also those of French-speaking Africa. The Congo alone has more than 50 million speakers.
Are all these people going to reform the agreement of the past participle because the professors of a province which counts some 7 million French speakers want to do it? The answer is no. People will tell me that there are also reformers in France, Switzerland and Belgium. That’s right. There may even be some in Brazzaville, Dakar or Kinshasa. But they are not the majority. Far from it.
I fear that this reform, if it goes ahead, will lead to an immense waste of time, just as did the spelling reform, which, 40 years after its enactment, has still not imposed neither in the big newspapers nor in the big publishing houses.
Reform or not, as long as we do not devote to French the time necessary to learn it, it will always remain poorly mastered. And we should stop demonizing our beautiful language. It is not because rules were created a few centuries ago that they no longer hold.
The past participates
My mother had finished her 7e year, not one more. It was in the 1930s. I never knew the precise cause of his school difficulties. It remained nebulous when she spoke to us about it. Today, we would certainly have attached a few letters to his disorder. Nevertheless, she wrote without mistakes.
The recent debate over simplifying past participle agreement reminded me of how much she cares about us applying ourselves when it comes time to write. How many times she repeated to us: “The ifs don’t like spokes or anything that deserves to be done deserves to be done well. »
These days, voices are rising, left and right: “The rules are complicated, it’s confusing or it dates from 400 years ago. It doesn’t make sense! »
It would even be disconnected from the reality of young people today. Finally some good news, I also think that young people are a little too connected.
But now in Côte d’Ivoire, we have instead chosen to dust off dictation: “Our children are intelligent, we must teach them that it is important to know how to write and it is an exercise which today is bearing fruit. . It is a flagship activity for the Minister of National Education and Literacy [Mariatou Koné] whose vision is to ensure that dictation is seen as an effective learning tool,” noted the Inspector General responsible for administration and school life, Faustin Koffi.
The love of the right word and the pride of the work accomplished have no borders. The little Douflé Nizié Anne Penuel, 10 years old, finalist for the Ivory Coast: “Sometimes I had some difficulties, but today I raised my level and I am happy. I feel happy and I feel happy to represent my country.1 »
Leveling down
I am not nostalgic for dictation or other learning methods, I am more interested in the results than in the way of obtaining them. And if we need more innovative approaches, never mind, as long as we don’t do things just to make them easier. I am more wary of the race to the bottom than of the effort required to master the intricacies of our common language. I would be really disappointed if our young people were the only ones in the Francophonie for whom the agreement of past participles represents too great a challenge.
Fortunately, the past is still part of the present. On May 21, 80 young people from the fifth and sixth years of elementary school will meet in Montreal to celebrate the French language, for the duration of a dictation. Benin, Morocco, Burundi, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Haiti, Rwanda, Mali, Togo, Burkina Faso, United States and Canada will participate in the La Dictée PGL International Grand Final on the theme “Let us cultivate a just and egalitarian world”.
I will be there too, with one of my granddaughters who is among the finalists. Mom left us a long time ago, but I will rejoice for two thinking how happy she would have been to know her.