When reading the debates in the news on the subject of education in Quebec, one constant emerges, namely that the reflection essentially focuses on inequalities and on the treatment of students in difficulty. The subject is obviously important, and a modern society like ours is right to want to give a good future to all young people, regardless of their abilities.
However, the importance we give to these subjects casts a good number of students into the shadows, quite simply forgotten by the “experts” in educational sciences and other technocrats. We are of course talking about the calm and valiant student.
Minority or slight majority
In a regular classroom, students who want to learn and work seriously are either a minority or a small majority. In all cases, their daily lives are handicapped by the large presence of students who do not listen, who behave extremely disruptively, who make a lot of noise and who suffer very few consequences. The refusal of Quebec schools to further segment classes leads us to anarchic classes where valiant students are penalized in their learning by poorly behaved students who should be placed in specialized classes.
Go further
It would be wrong to ask good students to keep quiet and make do with the means at hand. These calm and serious students should be pushed to learn more, to go further, to realize their full potential.
Above all, they have the right to go to school in an environment that is truly conducive to learning, and not in a constant cacophony that slows them down.
Private schools and the international education program (IEP) already skim off a good portion of these well-behaved students (although there are a whole lot of poorly behaved ones in the private sector and in the IEP). Their presence, however, is not enough, because valiant students in ordinary classes are left behind, as if their success were taken for granted.
However, the school’s mission is not only success, but also excellence. These students are capable of excellence and Quebec schools are deliberately obstructing them. All of this testifies to a society that places little value on education and ambition in general.
The ideal of diversity
There is also the fact that our schools lack resources and that many funds are wasted on more or less useful jobs and learning technologies that contribute absolutely nothing. The massive immigration imposed by the Canadian regime also causes us to divert a lot of money towards welcoming new arrivals, which exceeds our integration capacities to no extent.
Contrary to what is loudly repeated, the Quebec school is not an “apartheid”, on the contrary it is too absorbed by the ideal of diversity. However, learning can only be done by taking into account each context, by making clear distinctions between each group of students according to levels and behaviors. By continuing on the current path, we are leaving behind many students who would like nothing better than to work and learn.