If a supernatural force were to suddenly cause the entirety of our schools, colleges and universities to vanish, as well as the programs of the Ministry of Education and all the habits and traditions accumulated by Quebec teachers from successive generations, would we want to recreate Institutions identical to those thus disappeared to meet our current needs?
So many formerly reasoned choices, which today seem so natural, so necessary to us, cannot fail to appear increasingly obsolete, in proportion to the ever more pressing urgency to fill vacant positions – the current unemployment rate stands at 4.3%, a historic low; population aging continues; immigration will not fill the labor gap.
Several centuries ago, our society launched the project of training young people in classrooms with teachers themselves trained by the Church and then by a tutelary State, rather than directly in the workplace with craftsmen and professionals trained by the work itself.
She instituted a school calendar, decreeing that learning should begin in late August and end in early June, rather than as needed. She grouped students into cohorts isolated from each other based on age, rather than learning; it preferred to specialization and deepening the study in parallel, on the surface and “just in case” of a multitude of weakly related and essentially discursive disciplines; it wanted to measure success by standardized recitations and examinations rather than by the value of individual service to society.
It extended schooling away from the vestibule of adult life, and there too it separated education from work for the most part, systematically inserting one, two, three, four years of schooling between the choice of a job and the hands in the dough.
Dilemma
Our distant ancestors, living in small communities close to nature, did not know our dilemma. They accompanied the young boys on the hunt with fathers, uncles, brothers and cousins, the young women at home with mothers, aunts, sisters and cousins for the preparation of food, the making of clothes, the care of children and elders. .
The economy and the community merged into a single family business. There was no clear separation between school life and life, no report cards replacing experience, no homework, no “jump” from the diploma to the labor market. The youth participated in the community as soon as they were able. Some deduce from this that adolescence is a school creation: it is defined as all the people of age to participate in society who are nevertheless made to squirm on the school benches.
The birth of the first cities and the subsequent specialization of economic roles stole children from their parents, who had to entrust them to masters capable of transmitting to them the science and the art of a trade that they themselves did not master. But in those remote times, the youth were quick to participate to the extent of their abilities.
I am not saying that a person is fit for work without prior education, nor that our education system does not strive to introduce realistic internships and simulations, nor that a class is not suitable for learn to read, write and count, nor that our society has not been able to function and develop for many decades without the full participation of young people, nor that child labor must be abused as in the past, nor that the average retirement age will not increase, helping to alleviate the labor shortage somewhat.
I’m just saying that you don’t learn a trade in a classroom; that one does not participate in society in a class; that we do not come into contact with all the richness of reality in a class and that very soon, we will simply no longer have the luxury of delaying economic and social integration in this way, because we will be sorely lacking in participants in all areas, including in the schools themselves.
Impatience
Perhaps some of the students confined to classes are also impatient to participate; that many teachers themselves would like to work outside of a classroom; that the family could take over from the state the task of transmitting culture? Four birds with one stone, then!
This problem, announced in the mid-1990s (but without being taken very seriously) by the tenors of the Action Démocratique du Québec, is too complex to be discussed in depth in the pages of a daily. I believe that we can nevertheless suggest some initiatives here, for example the accelerated repatriation of training from the classroom to the workplace, so that we can re-establish the union that is so natural between learning and social participation .
Whatever we do, schooling can no longer keep them artificially separated. Major transformations will soon upset the relationship between work and education. It is an eventuality that is a priori regressive, but which could, all things considered, prove to be beneficial both for the youth who will be valued and for our society which will be able to grant them more space.