Pierre Falardeau once said: “People who die die for a long time. It’s painful and it hurts. » While we persist in a form of futile politeness like “Hello-Hi » or on the application of Law 101 at the college level, the damage continues to be done. We should act at the source of the scourge, and not fight its symptoms, especially those that have been rooted in our society for so (and too) long.
It’s an open secret that the French are in decline, and their precariousness should ring alarm bells among our decision-makers. They will respond that they care about our language and that they are already doing everything to protect it. They will stretch out millions to cover up the problem. In vain. For a distinct people like ours to successfully survive, everything must begin at school.
Our schools should reflect what Quebec wants to be in a hundred years. Currently, the education system is experiencing a major crisis. A glaring indicator in this sense is the historic teachers’ strike that took place at the end of last year. Whether you agree with this type of pressure or not, the war made it possible to shout loud and clear that things could no longer continue like this. The lack of vision and the desire for re-election of the political class unfortunately lead to the current chaos, which fuels a shortage of teachers which will only worsen.
What is paradoxical is that the current Minister of the French Language was until very recently at the head of the Ministry of Education. Jean-François Roberge is also a former teacher, which should lead him to know better than anyone how school plays a fundamental role in language matters. It’s easy to say that this amount will be invested in schools to help promote French. In what, when and how? That’s what we never say.
But why has the State – through its multiple changes in governance – allowed the situation to develop like this to the point of leading us to our downfall?
However, everything should start at small school. The survival of our language, our culture, our identity and our literary and cultural world depends on the education we receive. Currently, the school is failing miserably to fulfill this role. From primary school onwards, we see students developing serious deficiencies in French, deficiencies which will only become more pronounced as they progress through school.
Consequence: there will be fewer and fewer seasoned readers and writers. But for a language to survive, there must be people who understand it well and who bring it to life through its great works and its artists. Instilling a taste for reading and words cannot be achieved by always being on the run. When we run, we see less clearly and we are always out of breath; It’s very difficult to learn to read and write correctly when you’re out of breath and out of time.
Especially when the student coming from an allophone family and supposed to be in the reception class is instead integrated into the regular class. The latter is likely to quickly develop difficulties if he does not have the necessary support at home. This is not how you develop a love of a language in a child. He will not appreciate his educational progress, he will especially develop bitterness towards this French which gives him so much trouble. The classroom should be where the love of language begins and not the other way around.
It’s not much simpler for the student who attends a school in La Baie, in Saguenay. Will he be able to fall in love with his own language to the point of wanting to defend it for generations to come? Or will he let himself drown in this English-speaking sea which also surrounds him and which is so attractive with his TikToks and company?
Currently, preschool-primary teacher training in a well-known university devotes 19 credits out of 120 to French through didactic courses, or 16% of the initial training program, which is very little for mastering and transmitting knowledge. adequately use this complex language. French, a key factor in the survival of the Quebec people, represents a little less than a fifth of the training of a primary school teacher. There are no courses in general culture, literature or creative writing.
Why not provide French specialists from kindergarten? Why would a teacher be trained in the same way in Montreal as he is in Bas-Saint-Laurent? It is a different linguistic reality and, yet, we find no trace of this famous differentiation.
The shortage of teachers only accentuates the decline of our language. In the classes, there are fewer language support teachers for newcomers, fewer reception class teachers, fewer remedial teachers to help students who are in difficulty and more libraries without librarians (when there are libraries). ). Normand Baillargeon shouts: this professional desertion “is a national tragedy”. I would even add that the current crisis within our schools is also a question of life and death for the Quebec people and their culture.