Shortage of judgment | The Press

Under Law 21, in these times of staff shortages, one can therefore hire as a teacher a man with well-known extremist speeches or someone who has only a high school diploma, but not a teacher who would wear the hijab and would be perfectly qualified.

Isn’t it wonderful?

This is what I thought about when I read the disturbing article by my colleague Marie-Eve Morasse, which revealed that a preacher, some of whose students had left to do jihad and who openly praised the Taliban, was briefly hired as a teacher of French in a public secondary school in the Mille-Îles school service center¹.

“His name is Adil Charkaoui and he will start this Thursday,” announced an email from management sent on August 30.

Chance or coincidence, when my colleague asked the employer questions, he suddenly changed his mind. After the “customary checks completed”, we changed our minds the day before the candidate took office.

Perhaps it was belatedly realized that lack of personnel does not excuse lack of judgment. And that a man who praises the obscurantist and misogynist regime of the Taliban is not exactly the exemplary teacher to whom we would like to entrust our children².

Following the publication of the article on Wednesday, the office of the Minister of Education, Jean-François Roberge, in turn made checks with the school service center in question. Adil Charkaoui will not be able to teach students in Quebec, either public or private, we are told. The Ministry will shortly send schools a reminder of the verification measures required before hiring a teacher.³.

How is it that, in this specific case, the complete “customary checks” were not done earlier in the hiring process?

I would have liked to know, but the spokesperson for the school service center refused to answer my questions, contenting herself with sending me by e-mail the same “cut and pasted” answer that had already been sent to my colleague.

“I confirm that Adil Charkaoui will not teach in one or other of our establishments,” she wrote, repeating that the school service center cannot comment on human resources files.

Memo for the next time: it would still be good to do the “usual checks” before choosing your candidate, and not after.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister François Legault reiterated the importance of secularism and the values ​​to be preserved in our society, citing Bill 21 and making an unfortunate amalgam between immigration and violence, for which he later apologized. .

Although I am in favor of the secularism of the state, it seems to me that Bill 21, driven by a debate that focuses mainly on religious symbols in general and the Islamic veil in particular, misses the target in education.

The example of the preacher Charkaoui offers a good illustration of this. As he does not wear religious symbols, it seems that his hiring was not deemed to contravene the State Secularism Act even if his extremist public discourse does not exactly make him an example of a pedagogue in a secular and egalitarian society.

While if the Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, a symbol of the struggle for the education of girls whom the Taliban wanted to kill on her return from school in Pakistan, had wanted to become a teacher in Quebec, we would have excluded d her candidacy straight away, because of her hijab.

Even in the midst of a staff shortage, even though she graduated from Oxford University and would certainly be an inspirational teacher to her students, that would have been a dismissal. Find the mistake.

I believe it is particularly important that the school be a secular, egalitarian space of learning, free from proselytism, hate speech or incitement to violence, whether spoken in the name of religion or not. That while respecting everyone’s freedom of conscience, the school should be a place for the transmission of knowledge and not a place for the transmission of beliefs. A place where we learn to think without being told what to think. Where we train citizens with a “well made” head rather than a “full one”, to use the words of Montaigne.

It goes without saying that the teacher plays a key role in this regard. But I do not believe that the absence of religious symbols, as required by Law 21, de facto guarantees its neutrality. Nor do I believe that the mere presence of such a sign should be a brake on hiring.

What matters in class is not so much what the teacher has in mind, but what is in his head.

I don’t know about you, but me, shortage or not, between a teacher who only has a high school diploma⁴, another who defends a fundamentalist regime or a candidate like Malala, it seems to me that the choice is clear. It is the choice of a secular, open and egalitarian school, which hires the most qualified and competent candidates. A school where one learns to doubt more than to believe and to always be wary of appearances.