In the debates about the decline of the French language and Quebec culture, a verb often comes up: “to dust off”.
In my opinion, this poses a series of problems. Last example, a title in The Press yesterday: “French teachers want to dust off past participles. »
The article focused on the grievances of French teachers, transmitted to the Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville.
The idea of no longer teaching exceptions to the agreement of past participles is not new. In 2019, The newspaper reported that French language experts, such as Mario Désilets, French didactician, and Marie-Éva de Villers, author of the Multidictionnaire, were in favor of it. Maybe we should go through that.
Faced with the disaffection for French in the younger generations, the reflex is often to say that our language is too “complex”. Hence the craze for simplification, one of the avatars of “dusting”.
A few years ago, the spelling reform had to be embraced as soon as possible. The change from “onion” to “ognon”, the removal of circumflex accents (to know, etc.) promised to make French instantly irresistible. Did it work? Whatever, we do it again with the past participles.
The guilty
The “past”, the “dust”, precisely, here is what disturbs, today: “When a student says to me: ‘Madam, I don’t understand why we grant it like that’, the only answer I gives is that people decided the rules 400 years ago, ”testified a teacher, in The Press.
Allowing to no longer agree “in gender and in number the past participle used with avoir when the direct complement is placed before the verb” will it really slow down the decline of French?
I doubt. It seems to me that the deep sources of the decline are elsewhere. First in the ubiquity and omnipotence of American or English-language digital applications and platforms, among others.
But also in our excessive passion for “dusting”.
In March, Ministers Drainville and Lacombe (Culture) visited a school to discuss French. The students, it seems, welcomed the idea of “using Quebec books, songs and films for learning French”. O joy!
But several young people would have “insisted that the proposed works be contemporary”. Minister Mathieu Lacombe declared himself “sensitive to that”.
Our time has decided that it has nothing to learn from the past, on which it casts a contemptuous look: it is for it a “great darkness”, the only otherness perhaps that deserves an attitude of closure .
However, “given that the world is old, always older than [les élèves]the fact of learning is inevitably turned towards the past”, underlined the philosopher Hannah Arendt.
In today’s world, adults, ministers, it seems, are ready to give in to the customer approach (“that’s what young people want”), toss culture with the door -dust. On the contrary, taking an interest in the past, in the works it has bequeathed to us, could nevertheless give a rich meaning to learning and develop a critical spirit in the face of our time.