Note: The link for the primary version of the QEP has been repaired. My apologies if you previously tried to locate it & couldn’t!

A fellow home educator was asking this week about teaching social studies in Quebec, specifically what requirements she must meet and where to find out what they were. I wrote the following post in answer to her questions, and decided to place a copy here at the Freehold because the information - especially any information from the Quebec ministry of education (MELS) published in English - is often difficult to find on their web site. I hope some of you will find it helpful.

I’d like to preface the post by saying that homelearners in Quebec are not obliged to follow the Quebec Education Program (QEP.) It may, however, prove to be helpful in weighing various curriculum options or in deciding how much time you want to devote to a given subject. In evaluating your children’s learning experience or progress, you may find the “competences” are a good place to start. Although by no means a perfect program, the competence approach is in some ways fairly in tune with the educational philosophies of many home educators.

Your comments are most welcome!

***

Government Approved Texts and Curricula

1) To find approved instructional materials (texts and reference books) you can go to the MELS web site:

You’ll quickly notice that, for the moment, there are no English-language texts approved outside of those for primary math & science - and none at all for secondary studies. You can find some French texts, though the ones we looked at were expensive & a little harder to obtain. There are some reference materials approved for anglophone students, however. If you don’t already have a Bible, dictionary or atlas for your kids, it’s worth taking a look at their recommendations.

2) To know what the official program of study is for any given subject, you can consult the Quebec Education Program (QEP):

Preschool/Primary Education (pre-K through grade 6)*
| English | French |
* Keep in mind children in Quebec are not legally required to begin school until age 6

Secondary Education, Cycle One (Sec I-II, or grades 7-8)
| English | French |

Secondary Education, Cycle Two (Sec III-V, or grades 9-11)*
| English | French |
*Quebec students are required to finish out the school year in which they turn 16, and can go to CEGEP after completion of grade 11

***

Social Studies for Quebec Homelearners

The social studies program for primary students officially begins in Cycle 2, that is grade 3. It’s a single course, called “History, Geography & Citizenship Education.” If your kids are not yet in grade 3, don’t sweat it!

Cycle 2 (grades 3 & 4) covers the Iroquois, the Algonquins, the Inca, and the 13 Colonies of New England. Time frames run from 1500-1745. Cycle 3 (grades 5 & 6) covers a time frame from 1745 into the current era. The native societies studied are the Inuit & the Micmac. The program also looks at life in the Prairies and the Pacific coast, and one “undemocratic” culture. Throughout the two cycles, life in Quebec (in the context of New France & then Canada) is compared to life in the other societies.

There’s a diagram on page 94 of the QEP that neatly summarizes what the public schools are supposed to teach at the primary level. At the secondary level, the courses appear to be more of a broad historical survey, beginning in ancient times.

Please note that you are not obliged to follow the exact program of study outlined in the QEP, nor are you obliged to use approved materials. That’s a relief, considering there aren’t any approved materials for social studies in English!

The important thing is that you offer an equivalent to school experience. Mostly, you’ll find school boards focus on your child being able to re-integrate into public school with fairly little difficulty, should the need arise. Some families who have withdrawn children from public school like to choose a few of the approved books, however, and include them in the list of teaching materials they send to the school board. This helps to reassure the board that you have made informed decisions about curricula, and that the experience your children are living at home will be equivalent to the public school education. Not the same, just equivalent.

***

Some Additional Resources

Free e-books for Canadian history at Old Fashioned Education
Miss Maggie is a tremendous lady, and has devoted herself to helping families offer nutritious food and excellent educational materials to their kids at low cost. Take some time to look at the rest of her site, too!

Dear Canada Series
This is a series of historically inspired diaries from Scholastic

Our Canadian Girl Series
A large collection from Penguin

List of resources for primary social studies in Quebec
At the LEARN web site

***

About the Legalities of Home Education in Quebec

I do eventually intend to get around to writing about the Quebec Education Act and other legalities around homeschooling in Quebec. For now, let me just say that homeschooling is a legal option for all Quebec parents. If you are just starting out in your homeschooling adventures, you may find that AQED (Quebec Home Based Educators Association) or ACPEQ (Association of Christian Parent-Educators of Quebec) are good places to research the legalities. There is a good bit of legal information on the ACPEQ web site, where members of the public can view them. They seem to base their recommendations on information provided by HSLDA (Home School Legal Defence Association - Canada).

To view the information on the AQED web site, your best bet is to register for their forum, as you’ll find most of what you want in the discussion topics and downloadable documents. If you can’t access all the information you’d like to see, you can become an AQED member. It’s not expensive. The main drawback is that the majority of information on their site so far is only available in French.

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Thanks!

From the Secular Homeschooling web site:

If you’re interested in writing for Secular Homeschooling Magazine, this is where you can get a better idea of what we’re looking for. If you want to submit an article or you have a question, e-mail me.

General guidelines

All articles submitted must be original and not previously published (appearing on a blog or web site counts as having been previously published). No reprints or simultaneous submissions, please.

When submitting, please include the article in the body of the email as well as in an RTF or Word (.doc) attachment.

Full-length articles should be between one and two thousand words, but this is a guideline rather than a hard and fast rule. Longer pieces will happily be considered. The article should be as long as it needs to be. If you’re worried, go ahead and query.

Payment is on publication. At this point, I pay $15 for full-length articles (other rates are detailed below). I apologize for the small sum; at this point, all expenses are out of pocket. My first priority is to pay contributors more as I get subscribers and advertisers.

Articles

We are always looking for articles about homeschooling. I would especially like to see articles on teaching science, math, and history; homeschooling the only child; homeschooling children of various ages; homeschooling a special-needs child; craft projects that teach; children’s learning styles; and making it work as a working homeschooling parent. I also like “a day in the life of a homeschooling family” articles. Humor pieces are great — just keep it clean, the kids might be reading this! This list is to give you an idea of the kind of thing I’d like to see, but these are only suggestions. I’ll read about anything you think would be of interest to homeschoolers. If you’re not sure and would like to sound me out before you go to all the work of writing an article, by all means send me a query letter.

Please understand the difference between an idea and an article. If you have a thousand favorite web sites bookmarked that you think would be of interest to homeschoolers, don’t offer to send me the whole list. Pick some that are related and write about why you like them and how they’ve been of use to you or your children.

This journal is for all homeschoolers, so articles must be positive; it’s perfectly all right to write a piece in celebration of unschooling, or about how school-at-home works for you, but no trashing those with differing educational philosophies, please. We also prefer that pieces be pro-homeschooling rather than anti-school.

No sexism, please. As the mother of a peaceable, introverted boy who has a knack for making friends with every wild-child girl on the homeschooling block, I can’t keep a straight face when reading an article about how much more active and aggressive boys are than girls. When talking about homeschooling children in general, please alternate the use of “he” and “she,” rather than sticking entirely with one or the other.

This is a non-religious homeschooling magazine. That doesn’t mean that if you’re religious, you can’t submit an article. It means that I don’t accept articles that are religious in tone. Articles about teaching the Bible for cultural literacy, or teaching comparative religion, are welcome. Articles about how homeschooling has made you a better Christian are not. Conversely, there is to be no religion-bashing. Non-religious does not mean anti.

Product Reviews

These are always welcome and should be at least 400 words in length. At this point, they’re freelance projects. I hope to get to the point where publishers and manufacturers are sending me stuff to review, but for now, I’d love to hear about any book or educational product that you’ve used. Product reviews do not have to be positive! They should be personal, though. I’d love to hear about what disappointed you and why, especially if the issue is undisclosed religious content. Of course, glowing reviews are always nice, as long as you mean it. Just write what you wish you’d known, good or bad, before you purchased the book or product.

Right now, I can pay $5 for product reviews, or $10 if they’re accompanied by professional print-ready artwork. If you write about a few products and it runs a thousand words or more, I’ll pay you the $15 I would for a full-length article.

Home Scholars

Young homeschoolers are invited to contribute short articles, stories, black and white artwork, and poems for our Home Scholars page. Contributors will be paid $5 for each accepted submission.

Money Matters

These articles are for homeschoolers on a budget — in other words, pretty much all of us. They don’t have to be about saving money on homeschooling materials, although pieces about where to get used curricula and other educational bargains would be great. But they can be about penny-pinching in any ordinary area of our lives, from buying in bulk to inexpensive meal ideas. I’d love to hear about places to get worthwhile coupons, or an account of fighting for your rights to get educator discounts as a homeschooler.

Cartoons and comics

As we are a perfect bound journal on matte paper rather than glossy, black and white cartoons and comics relating to homeschooling are very welcome. Cartoonists will be paid $5 per comic.

Hot Chocolate!

This is a regular column, written by the editor but relying on input from readers. This is the place where we relay good news on the homeschooling front, whether it’s a legal victory or one of our number winning the spelling bee again. The news doesn’t have to be big or world-shaking, just good and homeschooling-related. I can’t pay for the items for Hot Chocolate! yet, but you’ll have my undying thanks and your name mentioned as the bearer of good news. (Please go ahead and give me your full name even if you’d prefer I not print it; I’ll be happy to use first name only, or initials, or whatever you’d prefer. Just let me know.)

Here We Go Again…

Hot Chocolate’s evil twin. Exactly what it sounds like. Whether it’s a public figure saying something really stupid about homeschoolers, or yet another news story that makes a big point of calling the juvenile delinquent or abusive parent a homeschooler (usually not even true — these stories rarely look into the legalities of homeschooling, and will happily label truants and negligent parents as “homeschoolers” — and anyway, why don’t they make a big point of saying that someone evil went to public school?) — whatever the bad news is, we want to hear it, if only so we know who to write to or complain about. Payment rates are currently the above-mentioned undying gratitude and immortality of having one’s name in print.

The magazine is also available, for those who just want to read it! Some of the features from Issue #1 are available online to give you a bit of a taste, or you can purchase a hard copy or a full year’s subscription. Available in the US, Canada, or internationally, and payable through PayPal.

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Thanks!

I’d like to share with you an excerpt from the article “A More Perfect Union“, featured in Secular Homeschooling Magazine’s first issue. The account is written by editor Deborah Markus, and it tells the story of a mother’s struggle to help her son through the admissions process at Santa Monica College, despite the efforts of some staff to exclude him because he was “just a homeschooler.”

In light of the current trends in Quebec education, the message of this article is particularly interesting. Our kids are still in primary school, but we watch with great interest the discussions about secondary school requirements and CEGEP admissions.

One thing I have noticed lately is that the government seems to be moving away from the old admission requirements we are familiar with, the ones that say anyone over age 19 can apply as a mature student. It seems that today all colleges that receive government funding & want their programs accredited must require either a high school diploma from a public or private school, or the equivalent certification from a school board adult education program. While homeschoolers had been accepted until recently based on their individual academic merits, apparently this is no longer the case. Nor is there an equivalency or a test, like a GED (these aren’t accepted in Quebec.) One simply must have a government prescribed & controlled proof of education.

The only options left open to homeschoolers who prefer not to go the government testing route, seem to be to go outside the province or to continue home studies until the student can apply for university. Although universities are slightly more independent, they do still receive government funding. I wonder if we complacently accept the new CEGEP admissions policies, how long will it be until the universities fall to the same pressures, and institute policies that similarly discriminate against home educated students?

When discussions about the change in CEGEP admissions policies arose on a forum I read, homeschooling parents were offering a lot of the same kind of advice received by the mother in Ms Markus’ story: essentially how to “make the gold seal” or get the tests that would transform her son from “just a homeschooler” into a “test-taker.” I must admit, when we discuss our own children’s higher education I too have been known to focus on ways of either jumping through the hoops or going around them. It’s a little intimidating to talk about knocking them down altogether!

Especially as an individual.

Please take the time to read the article all the way through. It’s long, but it is worth your time and consideration. Here’s a bit of it for you to chew on:

Though gratified that the problem was taken care of so easily once she had a representative of the law on her side, Uhler was baffled that she was the one who had to take it on. Many homeschoolers in California utilize the private school option, and many of them send their children to community colleges. Thanks to its location and high transfer rate to major universities, SMC has a very decent share of previously-homeschooled students. Yet when Uhler looked around for help with her particular problem, she couldn’t find any site that addressed what she was going through.

What was going on? Why hadn’t this been taken care of long before she and her son came on the scene?

She asked her lawyer this, and felt at once validated and baffled by his answer. People get intimidated, he told her. They back off. They wait until their child is a legal adult, or they jump through the hoops — take the proficiency exam or the GED, whatever it takes.

That was exactly the kind of response Uhler got when she turned to fellow homeschoolers for assistance. The ones who weren’t advising her on purchasing or manufacturing gold seals were giving her the ins and outs on having her son take the tests in question.

And that’s the real point that needs making here.

As homeschoolers, we’re used to being independent. The whole reason we homeschool in the first place is that we like to go our own way. We’re not looking for a fight. We want to be left in peace to do as we please.

We’re also used to being a minority, one that isn’t appreciated or understood by the mainstream population. We just want to teach our kids and live our lives.

In other words, we shy away from conflict and do our best to accommodate the world.

And that’s exactly why SMC has been able to treat homeschoolers the way they have. And they can’t be the only ones doing it, either.

Another Mom told me recently that she was disappointed to find how independent homelearners are here in Quebec. Sure, there are those who organize field trips and classes for gym or art. There are those who try to establish some sort of support group in which we can exchange information and share resources, in which our kids can socialize and find a sense of belonging. Let me be the first to say these folks should be congratulated for their efforts, and that they are most definitely making a positive change for home based education in Quebec. I know of families who have kept their kids in a public school, and who have even returned to public school after homeschooling, because they did not have access to these resources.

But it must be said that we are very independent, especially when in comes to the core courses our children are studying - language arts, math, science, social studies. We are also perhaps buck passers when an individual in our midst comes to the group with fears about dealing with school board officials, or after encountering a legal obstacle - how many times have you heard, “You should join HSLDA (or AQED or ACPEQ.) They’ll help you with this”? How many times have you been on the receiving end of this advice, when what you most wanted to hear was that the people you have come to know through your mailing lists, blogs and meetings are on your side, that they’ve got your back and won’t allow anyone to step all over your legal right to homeschool?

Ms Markus says, “We’re a group of very individualistic individuals — and that’s a wonderful thing. But it shouldn’t stop us from remembering that we are a group. We’re seen as one; we’re treated like one. We have to act like one sometimes…… Every once in a while, … it’s time to be loud and insistent and say that you and your community are a force to be reckoned with.”

Are we in Quebec acting as a community? Do we want to?

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Thanks!