Every Tuesday, The duty offers a space to the creators of a periodical. This week, we offer you a text published in the magazine Argument, flight. 26, no 1 (fall-winter 2023-2024).
While, in the past, different actors have campaigned for the abolition of general education, when not outright for the abolition of CEGEPs, it seems at present that no one is explicitly supporting or defending such a project.
Since the failure of the Forum on the Future of College Education in 2004, public discourse on the general education provided in CEGEPs has focused on whether or not it is appropriate to make changes: should the general training and, if so, how and with a view to achieving what objectives?
Recent episodes of public debate on this issue have generally been initiated by supporters of the need to transform general education in terms of its composition: review the list of disciplines which contribute to it, the number of courses or hours of training associated with each, the student’s margin of choice regarding their training path, etc.
It is not surprising, then, that the debate was confined, for the most part, to this aspect of things. For my part, I consider it more fruitful to bring the discussion to another area: that of the evolution of the contents (skills to be taught, objects of study, methods of evaluation, etc.) prescribed in the course specifications. of general education, focusing here on French and philosophy courses. Without pleading for the need for a revision of this content, I support the relevance, even the desirable nature, of a rigorous operation which would consist of evaluating them and, if necessary, revising them.
The operation that I am calling for seems desirable to me for at least four reasons which I will simply state here:
1. The current estimates are the result of a major reform of which a global and formal critical assessment has never been drawn up.
2. The current estimates are detached from the evolution that university training in philosophy and literature has undergone over the last decades.
3. The current estimates are not sufficiently prescriptive regarding the common cultural fund that should be transmitted to students.
4. In their teaching experience, French and philosophy teachers face difficulties and legitimate dissatisfaction which are directly induced by the quotes.
None of these four reasons is in itself a sufficient reason to carry out an evaluation and review exercise. Together, however, they appear to me to argue strongly in its favor. I refrain from going so far as to say that they make it necessary because I believe that the teaching staff manages as best they can to manage their boat with the current estimates, so that it would appear to me quite an exaggerated fact of asserting that there is “peril at hand”.
However, for the operation that I am proposing to have reasonable chances of success, certain commitments should be made by the ministry in order to ensure a sufficient level of support within the teaching staff, and therefore to avoid that the operation is not completely blocked.
Their content itself of course has its own value, but if I support its necessity here, it is first and foremost because I see in it the political conditions essential to the success of the enterprise. Failing to explicitly exclude any modification to the composition of general training, that is to say, committing to maintaining a common core of three philosophy courses totaling 150 hours of training, and a common core of four courses of French accumulating 240 hours of training, the ministry would immediately be suspected of wanting to take advantage of the operation to come, underhandedly, to reduce the number of hours of training in these disciplines or to replace this common core with elective courses.
Likewise, failing to explicitly provide for broad consultations with teachers of French and philosophy at all important stages of the process, the ministry would again expose itself to the distrust of the latter, who would suspect it of having already written the conclusions of the operation, of wanting to push particular ideological orientations, of wanting to subject general training to the objectives of technical training or to the market, etc.
And, finally, failing to explicitly commit to preserving a large area of freedom for teachers in the design of their courses, the ministry would be accused of wanting to take advantage of the operation to standardize teaching and increase regulation and control exercised over it, a capital sin for teachers who fiercely and rightly claim their belonging to higher education.
In short, CEGEP teachers maintain a lot of distrust towards the ministry, and I am not excluding myself from the group: just think of the way in which it generally conducts revisions of specific training components of study programs collegial to justify such distrust.
I believe, however, that this distrust is not a sufficient reason to refrain from hoping that such an approach can be carried out adequately and from trying to think about the reasons which should motivate it and the conditions for its success. And if any government aspires to be able to say, one day, “I have succeeded in changing general education”, I am convinced that it has no other choice but to take the path that I have outlined.