The plan and intentions of the Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, to counter violence and bullying in schools are very noble. That’s not the problem. It lies rather in the fact that we are presented as a new intention with the desire to document these important social issues, to offer training and support in this area and to raise awareness in the community even though it has been 20 years at least that plans and policies have been piling up and gathering dust in the mysteries of the Ministry of Education (MEQ) without this improving the situation in schools as much as we would like.
Since becoming Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville has stormed – with good reason – against the apparent fog enveloping several essential aspects of school life. This time, he was shocked to discover that schools document acts of violence and bullying differently and that the figures he has to understand the scourge are incomplete and imperfect. Never mind: a uniform questionnaire will now be sent to schools so that they can carry out their review in the same way. We’ll know what we’re talking about.
Let’s take a slight step back to check if in Quebec, or at least at the Ministry of Education, we learn from our mistakes. In 2005, in his 2004-2005 annual report, the Auditor General of Quebec Renaud Lachance devoted an entire chapter to interventions in matters of violence in public secondary schools. He finds that despite the fact that schools are concerned about the phenomenon of violence, only 37% of them have taken the trouble to validate their perceptions with data. He therefore recommends that establishments get into the good habit of doing so. At this time, Quebec was worried about these threats looming over children: a vast social and health survey carried out among Quebec children and adolescents by the Quebec Institute of Statistics had just revealed, three years earlier, that 70% of 9-year-old children say they have experienced violence or bullying at school.
Since then, action plans and policies have been added up. In 2012, we even adopted the Act to prevent and combat bullying and violence at school, which, one might think when rereading this key document, seems to contain all the steps and conditions to be followed to provide schools with effective tools against violence. It was about ten years ago, and suddenly we would be in a fog? What evil is attacking the Ministry of Education and the branches of its network so that, time after time, it is tempted to return to nature and activate a blind mode of governance?
In recent months, the current minister has made numerous announcements aimed at making the education network more efficient. His past as a journalist perhaps serves him in his – well-founded – stubbornness in wanting to factually document a problem before providing it with a turnkey solution. Two questions arise: first, after so many years of wait-and-see attitude on the part of the education network, what allows us to believe that this time will be the right one and that the uniform questionnaire proposed by M Will Drainville succeed where so many initiatives have failed? Then, who will have the courage to tackle the apparent force of inertia from which the Ministry of Education suffers, suffocated by its gigantism? It is notorious that many of this ministry’s policies and plans, including several focused on academic success, were constructed in a form of blindness that is not worthy of its mission. We advance by trial and error where we should proceed with precision.
It is therefore a shame that for a file of such importance, which we imagined was well supervised since we have been talking about it for ages, the school is still apparently condemned to return to square one. Document the significance of the problem. Train resource people. Support school teams and, by extension, students. Raising awareness and acting in prevention, two basic concepts. Quebec has, however, experienced its share of disturbing events on the theme of violence within schools, such as the Dawson tragedy in 2006, which then forced an almost daily record of violent incidents in schools. schools, a practice that was abandoned over time. Acts of violence in schools make headlines. “Ordinary” violence occurs every day in the secrecy of the school.
It is not that the action plan presented by Mr. Drainville is useless or defective, because the theme it encompasses is of capital importance. It is rather that it arrives in a surprising way where we believed, quite naively, that things were already well taken care of. It seems that in education, as elsewhere perhaps, it is an eternal beginning again.