One thing annoys me in the way in which the debate engages, again, on the mission of CEGEPs and what constitutes their heart, general education.
I would sum up my annoyance as follows: it seems that CEGEP and general education – literature and philosophy in particular – are always on borrowed time, that they live on borrowed time, as if doubts about their necessity persisted, despite All. The astonishing levity with which we speak of reform and abolition means that we do not yet recognize CEGEPs as higher education institutions in their own right, capable of self-regulation and of calmly reflecting on ways to develop their programs. . Despite their remarkable success, CEGEPs remain fragile creatures, always on the brink of existential crisis, which one has the impression could disappear by simple decree: the Action Démocratique du Québec had proposed their abolition in 2007, current Prime Minister François Legault considered it in 2011, as did former Minister Pierre Moreau in 2013 and the Young Liberals in 2014. The idea briefly resurfaced in 2019 before being dismissed by the current government. Such a recurrence is abnormal.
In the eyes of many, CEGEPs have a dubious reputation (François Legault in 2011: “a cursed beautiful place to learn to smoke drugs1 ), literature and philosophy courses are criticized for complicating the lives of students receiving technical training, for not teaching anything useful, for undermining success rates.
And that’s without counting on the famous CEGEP teachers, always ready to go to the front to defend this or that, to “bark” – yes, it barks, in CEGEP2 – to remind us of the importance of their work. These CEGEP teachers are free, much more so than university teachers, and this freedom is disturbing.
As proof: the protest movement of CEGEP teachers in Quebec in favor of the extension of Bill 101 to colleges, a movement from the base and whose actors had to scrap against their central unions, which saw a bad eye the return of the linguistic question. During this time, the academics remained surprisingly silent, as if the choice of language of study at CEGEP had no impact on the choice of language of study at university, that it did not concern them. Rarely has a duty of reserve been observed with such zeal, and one wonders if university professors still have the freedom to speak out frankly on political questions that affect the common good.
But back to CEGEPs. With regard to general education, the same words come back like mantras, from one decade to another: if not abolished, we should “modernize”, “review”, “reform”, “rethink”, always in the sense of adapting to the needs of the market or to meet the demand of the student clientele, which basically amounts to the same thing. We are served the hammer argument of the changing world, we are told that the concerns of today’s young people are no longer the same as those of yesterday’s young people.
However, no one seems to understand that teachers are already adapting their approach and their content to the public they are addressing, that the programs are precise enough to provide a certain number of essential requirements, at the same time being sufficiently open to allow all kinds of concerns – environment, feminism, anti-racism, etc. – to find their place in the lessons. The teaching of philosophy and literature does not look like it did 30 years ago, for the simple reason that the teaching staff is renewing itself, that CEGEP teachers know perfectly well the world in which their students live and what questions they ask.
And then, to decree, as the Quebec Collegiate Student Federation recently did3that a major reform decided 20 or 30 years ago is already old and outdated, you have to live in a very young country with no memory.
In its very conception, general education aims to ensure the constitution of a common culture, shared references (which is not a problem in the English-speaking world, whose culture and references are already everywhere), a certain continuity also between generations, thus called to emerge from their echo chamber. Programs and content cannot be chosen on the basis of a student survey or to obey the latest fashionable trend. They must undergo the test of time, show their value over time. It is to be feared that à la carte humanities in line with the times – Netflix humanities, in short – will soon seem as dated as the news of the day before yesterday.
Not to mention that the very usefulness of disciplines such as literature and philosophy may lie precisely in the permanence that they embody. To read Plato, to discover Racine and Yourcenar, to hear the words of Miron and Hébert, to think with Arendt and Kant, is to understand that despite the passage of time, humanity remains strangely similar to itself, from an era to the other.
1. “Legault would abolish CEGEPs”, TVA Nouvelles, October 5, 2011
2. I owe this remarkable formula to the essayist Monique Larue: “Les ça yappe”, Disadvantagenotoh 18, August 2004.