If education were perceived as a fundamental value of Quebec culture, Dr. Bolduc would put his stethoscope around his neck next week and thus allow patients to have access to a family doctor.
If education were a fundamental value, there would not be only chroniclers and a few intellectuals to rebel against the ministerial blunder. If education were valuable to Quebecers, they would stop distrusting educated people. They would require teachers to have rigorous intellectual training. They would respect them and would encourage their children to respect their masters, whereas nowadays too many parents dissociate themselves from those who make it their business to pass on knowledge to their children.
We live in a society that values useful degrees, but places little importance on general education. It doesn’t matter that a young person knows how to write correctly, that he reads regularly, that he expresses himself in a language rich in vocabulary, as long as he learns his trade and earns his living in the mst pressing way.
Chip jump model
The much-clamored free schooling does not necessarily make people more inclined to want their children to have a long education, because it would force them to pay for their upkeep. Rare are the parents who consider as harmful for studies a parallel work of twenty or thirty hours. Do we know that at McGill University, full-time students are strongly advised not to work outside of class?
If education were at the heart of our quest for identity, how could we tolerate our young people enrolling in courses that they drop out of, then starting over again, in fact studying on the model of jumping chips, without continuity, as if they did not know that the school rhythm is intimately linked to the concentration necessary for learning?
While authorities in China are now demanding that schools reintroduce the teaching of calligraphy so that this expression of human knowledge is not lost to technological culture, we are letting our children lose their handwriting skills under pretext that the keyboard is the future of humanity.
What good is technology if we are unable to feed it content that is anything other than encrypted or unreadable tweets? Quebec has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ephemeral and questionable educational reforms. What is the use of training masters to teach if they do not have their subject, in other words, if they are more or less incapable of transmitting knowledge?
Do we want to educate children in the strongest sense of the term, that is, to teach them what is useful or essential to know? “The instruction of children is a job where you have to know how to lose time to gain it”, wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Émile ou de l’éducation. This notion of wasting time is essential to the formation of the mind. Quebec is a society that no longer takes the time to think, to contemplate, or to be bored. We are restless people who will not die if we ignore books.
The academic basis of education
On the other hand, neither should the basis of education be attributed solely to the family. Even if it is an important key since it is the closest model to the child, the school also plays a big role in education.
Academic education should not focus solely on imparting knowledge of various subjects such as mathematics or languages. In addition, she must be involved in the educational process of young people.
