Quebec’s education system is the most unequal in Canada and its public component is now an “obstruct” to development, denounces director Érik Cimon in a hard-hitting documentary titled L’école autre. It also points to possible solutions that would shake schools up considerably.
We can’t blame director Érik Cimon for beating around the bush: the first minutes of his film The School Otherwise pose a very harsh observation. He evokes a three-tier system where students are sorted according to their parents’ income, the neighborhood where they live, their neurological profile or their performance. Above all, it evokes a betrayal of the Parent commission, which revolutionized Quebec schools in the 1960s and wanted to make them a driving force for equal opportunity.
“The Parent report wanted public schools to be a social elevator, they became an obstacle to development,” says director Érik Cimon. If you send your child to regular school, you tell yourself that he will have a 15% chance of reaching university. I’m not saying that going to university is the only way to succeed in life, but this 15% is eloquent when we see that in the private sector, 60% of students go to university. . »
Digging the underside of the education system is a project that has interested Érik Cimon for years, given that its challenges, failures and successes have ramifications in many other spheres of society. “Education affects pretty much everything,” he observes. I could not understand why the system does not work and has so many flaws. So I asked as many questions as I could and I understood. »
What’s wrong with the education system? Competition between the public and the private sector, first.
These “rocks” are the overcrowded classrooms, where struggling students are overrepresented and find themselves in front of teachers and in schools that do not have the resources to support them adequately. This lack of diversity is the consequence of the skimming caused by the private system and the specialized public programs which select the best performing students and willingly exclude cases deemed “problematic”.
One of the solutions, according to the director and the École ensemble movement: integrate private schools into the public system, finance them 100%, remove the possibility of selecting students and ensure that the remaining private schools are completely private and that the parents bear the entire bill. Economically, the project stands, assures the director. But this is only one step among many.
A substantial part of L’école autre is interested in the type of evaluation currently carried out – grades – which are considered counterproductive by many experts and stakeholders, whether they work in the public or private sectors. . “It breaks the students, judge Érik Cimon. Evaluation should be used to improve, to make mistakes and to learn from them, not to give marks that a child will drag around like cannonballs. »
What is at the heart of his film, basically, is a vision of education and the role it plays in society: a place of development and integration, a place of innovation, a place of mix that pulls young people up and allows them to develop critical thinking. Objectives that the current fragmented school struggles to achieve, he says, because of the composition of the classes, but also of the heavy structure which weighs on the public system.
“We don’t trust teachers, they don’t have professional freedom,” laments Érik Cimon. How come private schools are doing so well without school boards or service centers? How is it that they can act with autonomy and that public schools would not be able to? That’s the elephant in the room. »
The school differently gives the floor to enlightened, committed, but also indignant teachers who would like to see the system reinvent itself. However, and this is one of the most worrying aspects of Érik Cimon’s documentary, no one feels any real desire to tackle the underlying issues. And the fact that most education ministers, with a few exceptions, send their own children to the private sector does not give the director much hope that things will change.