Less English, more sovereignty in schools
New education minister Marie Malavoy is moving towards less English and more promotion of sovereignty in our grade schools. A new program involving more English at grade six was supposed to start in 2015 (why does it take so long?) but has been put off. Malavoy is already defending her plans from accusations she’s politicizing education.
Marc 19:51 on 2012/10/11 Permalink
She says it’s too early for kids to learn the “foreign” language of English. Memo to Malavoy: The younger you are the better it is to learn languages. 4-5 year olds are sponges for languages. But hey I guess that’s what you get when you put ideology before scientific fact.
Christian 20:11 on 2012/10/11 Permalink
While they’re at it, why not toss intelligent design in the curriculum?
Kate 20:30 on 2012/10/11 Permalink
I wonder how they teach sovereignty. What category does it fall under – history? religion? a separate indoctrination period?
Anto 21:13 on 2012/10/11 Permalink
@Kate: You don’t, of course. The Liberals decided to ignore the national question in the history class, the PQ wants to put it back in. Not really surprising.
Singlestar 21:28 on 2012/10/11 Permalink
The government doesn’t actually write the texts. There are committees of civil servants, ped consultants, outside university people, etc.
What I found curious about her intervention was that she was unhappy that nationalism was given the same level of treatment as feminism!
jeather 22:36 on 2012/10/11 Permalink
She appears to suggest that there needs to be more discussion of sovereignty in the grade 10 history course. Having recently helped my sister study for it, I cannot say I disagree with this — there’s very little 20th century history in that class, there should be more, and 20th century history in Quebec involves sovereignty.
More “let’s prevent the francophones who can’t afford private schools from learning English”, on the other hand . . . well, that’s unsurprising, if still sad.
Ian 07:46 on 2012/10/12 Permalink
I’m with jeather – this is an important aspect of our history that should be covered in a school setting, especially since it’s a current in contemporary poltiics – better to know the history and context than to be a sovereigntist because you “vote with your heart’. But yeah, skipping ESL just seems silly. I didn’t get French until grade 6 in Ontario and my 6 year old already has a better grasp of many of the nuances of French than I do (her accent is certainly better) because she’s been learning both French & English since she started to talk. Early exposure makes a world of difference.
Kate 10:55 on 2012/10/12 Permalink
I wonder how objective the sovereignism studies are. Be interesting to see the material.
jeather 12:08 on 2012/10/12 Permalink
Well, yeah: the fact that I think there needs to be 20th century history and therefore sovereignty in the Sec IV course doesn’t mean that I think they will do it well.
C. Acosta 15:42 on 2012/10/12 Permalink
Why is CTV only putting in quotation the sayings of Fournier? This is total disinformation. Malavoy talks about how we teach History! She doen’t want to have Sovereignism classes in schools… See Le Soleil’s title and article (“Less English and more History”) :
http://www.lapresse.ca/le-soleil/actualites/education/201210/10/01-4582115-marie-malavoy-moins-danglais-plus-dhistoire.php
She wants history programs to point more about both ideologies and the events that occurred in 1980 and 1995.