Here’s another reason to homeschool: the Quebec education reform is slated to hit grade 10 (secondary IV) next fall, and yet there are no textbooks ready for the English speaking students.

Let that sink in for a moment. High school students begin to write provincial exams in grade 10. The same exact exam is given to every student in the province (or in the case of English schools, a translation of the French original.) In order for students to pass that exam they must have covered all the points in the Quebec Education Program for the specific courses they are taking. English high school students will be at a significant disadvantage without those books.

How can there not be adequate textbooks, you may ask. Kids everywhere study math, geography, history, literature, the arts. Even if English is a minority language in Quebec, it’s certainly the majority in the rest of Canada and it is spoken in the United States, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and many other countries around the world. So why couldn’t we bring in books from another Canadian province, or from the United States, if they are not available in Quebec?

The answer is that the books will not be approved by the Quebec ministry of education, the Minstère de l’Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport (MELS,) and they will not contain the necessary information to prepare a student for those end of the year provincial exams. I know, you’re probably asking yourself how a textbook from somewhere else could be so vastly different that the English students couldn’t get everything they needed from a book brought in from a neighbouring province.

Let me give you an example: in elementary school, cycle 2 (grades 3 & 4) there is a social studies course called “Geography, History and Citizenship Education.” It is taught over the space of two years, during which the students are expected to explore several specific cultures: the Inca, the Iroquoian peoples, the Algonquian peoples, the settlers of New France and the settlers of the 13 Colonies that later came together to found the United States. I won’t go too much into the details, but specific time frames are assigned, and also there are comparisons to be made between one group and another, or between one group of people and its descendants during a later time.

That kids in Quebec should study the history of New France is not at all surprising, nor is it much of a stretch that they should be looking at their neighbours to the south, or the first peoples of their region. I think the problem is that this course is very much a regional one, and of course places the emphasis on the French settlers who came to Quebec in those early days. While there is nothing at all wrong with such a course, it is obviously going to create a problem in terms of textbooks and other teaching materials. What book do you know that covers all those peoples, in the right time frames?

There are a bunch of them in French. Seven government approved texts from seven different publishers, to be exact. And some of these texts are part of an ongoing series of books written specifically for Quebec schools. So there are atlases or textbooks and workbooks for the French language and literature class, that go along with them. Or perhaps the publisher has another text in the series that addresses the cycle 3 curriculum. How many approved English texts are there for that same cycle 2 course? One, and that was just approved in the last three weeks.

For mathematics in elementary school, there is a choice of one and only one English text for cycles 1 & 3. In cycle 2, the choice increases to a whopping two textbooks to select from. There is one English language text approved for science in cycle 2.

That is the complete ensemble of approved English texts for the entire 11 years of primary and secondary education in Quebec. Eight books total. And not a single one for secondary students, who are then judged against their French speaking peers who do have approved textbooks.

So what’s going on? Is it just because the reform is new and publishers haven’t had a chance to get their materials approved? Is it because the materials just haven’t been translated from French into English yet?The education reform in Quebec dates back to the year 2000, and as such is almost a decade old. The new curriculum is being phased in over a number of years, so publishers have had years to prepare the necessary documents and the ministry has had almost as much time to approve texts.

Those who work in English language instruction say the lack of adequate textbooks is a “long-standing problem.” They talk about teachers scrounging for materials, photocopying translated materials, trying to find what they need on web sites. And we wonder why the so-called “free” public education in Quebec can cost $200 a year for “consumable materials,” when parents are already spending that much or more on the required school supplies! It’s all that photocopying.

Photocopying and teachers’ scrounging leads to more than increased costs (and I’m sure, a bigger carbon footprint - along with the costs of bussing those English kids further and further when local schools are closed.) Over the years we’ve seen teacher errors in everything from the math homework stencils to the French dictée (spelling lists) and verb conjugations.

There should be a very real concern over what the kids are being taught, and what they’re retaining. With no textbook to bring home, and very little written work to show parents, it’s a real challenge for Mom and Dad to figure out where the problems lie sometimes. But you know for sure there is a problem when all your 3rd grader can remember about the Iroquoian peoples from her social studies class is the longhouses (and that, only if you show her a picture) and that a lot of the Iroquois died of smallpox. When I tried to engage my daughter on this topic she was happy to supply more details of her lesson on the smallpox: “teacher said the ‘Indians’ died because they ‘didn’t have enough doctors.’”

That still hits me like a fist in the gut. What happened there? And I’m not even going to get into the fact that her course was supposed to have been taught in French, as it was a bilingual school & social studies is a subject taught by the French teacher… We got her an approved French text for that course, feeling she had an awful lot of rattrappage (catching up) to do…

I want to say I support the moratorium teachers are requesting. I want to say the government never should have brought in an educational reform for which they weren’t physically equipped. I want to blame the whole thing on the fact that the MELS isn’t quick enough getting the English books out (they do the translating in-house, because it isn’t worth the publishers’ cost for the few texts they will sell.)

But this is a problem that goes back to when I was a student. I remember my high school Canadian history course, some twenty or so years back. We had three textbooks for that one course. Big, nasty, heavy things. We lugged two of them around in permanence because we needed them both to get all the required information. The third was used more occasionally, but I seem to recall days when I had to lug three texts to class along with the pair of 2″ binders, the pencil case and such, and the text for the class that came after history. We practically needed a suitcase to carry all the stuff we were expected to have in class!

Education reform is a nice idea in theory, but talk to a teacher who has lived through a couple of them. Look at the difference it makes in what the kids are actually learning. It seems to me that the changes come and go, but we’re never happy with their results.

Maybe it’s time to drop all the reforms and do something more radical. I don’t know, I don’t have the magic solution for the ills of public education. That’s one of the big reasons we chose to homeschool: we’d done just about everything we could with the public school, and it wasn’t getting any better.

I’m not advocating everybody pull their kids out of school before the fall. Homeschooling isn’t for everyone, and when this many kids are so obviously in trouble if all the parents speak out maybe something can be done. But for the love of all things educational, let’s not have an educational reform end up being the instrument which disadvantages one group of students because of the language they speak.

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 to the Gazette and the MELS for the background data.

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