A fascinating article in La Presse this morning by Richard
Y. Bourhis of the department of psychology at UQAM, outlines the current, that
is to say the actual, state of balance between the francophone, anglophone and
allophone communities in the province of Quebec, using figures provided by the
provincial Ministry of Education, Leisure and Sport. The figures compare
numbers of students between 1972 and 2012, and the author recalls that the
Charter of the French Language (Bill 101) was brought in in 1977, the aim being
to consolidate once and for all the state of the French language in this, its
North American redoubt.
I recall Premier Rene Levesque
at the time saying he felt somewhat humiliated to have to bring in such
measures as to deny to anglophone children whose parents had not been educated
in Quebec, entry into anglophone schools, and to have to pressure children
whose native tongue was neither English nor French to study in French.
There were those at the time
who argued that these measures were no longer necessary, because the French
language had already been rescued from its decline by the immense changes
brought about in Quebec life by the Lesage government, elected in 1960, and the
minority communities, including the anglophones, so it was argued, were already
accepting the need to learn French in increasing numbers. Be that as it may,
the political need for the Bill was still there, as powerful groups were
propagating the need to diminish the still-powerful role of English in the
province. And there seems now to be almost total acceptance of Bill 101 and its
consequences.
I was living in Montreal from
1968 to 1975, having just returned from an eight-year assignment as the London
correspondent of The Montreal Star,
equipped with a family of three small boys all born in England, to whom was
later added a girl born in Montreal.
On arrival we put the children
into the nearest Protestant public school (the formal description of schools
for the anglophones) whose students were made up of 53 per cent Greek, 17 per
cent Moroccan Jews, 14 per cent Chinese and 10 per cent anglophone. They were
doing things in that school, such as teaching children who didn’t know a word
of English their new language, that would have freaked out most schools in Britain
had they been confronted with the same needs. In those days I was very critical
of schools and the schooling they provided, and after a year, dissatisfied, we
took our two younger children out and decided to drop the children into the
French, Catholic system, even though we were neither French nor Catholic.
We thought we were responding
to an urgent political need in the community, but when we approached the nearest
elementary school, they refused to take our children. This was an aspect of a
rather deplorable xenophobia common among a certain strata of the francophone Quebeckers of the time (they also would not take the Moroccan Jewish kids, even though
they were already French-speaking). For
a year my wife, a teacher, taught the two younger children at home, and a year
later as pressures to open up their intensely religious system, staffed by nuns
and brothers, mounted, the Catholic school authorities agreed to admit all
three boys, who were, basically put at the back of the room, ignored by the
nuns, and forced to fend for themselves. There were only six anglophone
children in the school.
They did learn French, but from
the other children in the playground. That their system was opening up was
indicated by their establishing a year later a special class for immigrant
children, where their special needs were looked to --- although to tell the
truth, my children were, for the most part, treated by the teachers as if they
were stupid, which has not prevented them from becoming, successively, after
many difficult years, a musician, a criminal lawyer, and a screenwriter.
Prof. Bourhis writes that the
number of anglophone students in Quebec declined by 41 per cent from 256,000 in
1972 to 105,000 in 2012, a reflection of the departure from Quebec of 300,000
anglophone citizens following the passing of Bill 101. An additional factor, of
course, was that the anglophone system was no longer permitted to shore up its
numbers with francophone, allophone and immigrant students, as they had been
accustomed to do. Of course, over these same years, the number of francophone
students also declined by 36 per cent, even in spite of the addition of
allophone and immigrant children who before went to the English-language
schools. In 1972 85 per cent of the allophone students went to the English
schools, whereas by 2012 that number had fallen to just under 14 per cent.
Prof Bourhis’s conclusions may
surprise many: he says that because of the enthusiasm of anglophone parents for
immersion French classes, and even for (like us) enrolling their children in
the French schools, today anglophones are the most bilingual section of Quebec
students, noting that in 2015 the scores obtained in French in provincial
examinations by students from anglophone schools were 9.4 per cent higher than
those obtained by students from the francophone schools, a fact that, he
remarks “demonstrates that the anglophone schools and educational commissions
also contribute to the development of the French fact in Quebec.”
Notably, he adds, community
interest seems to be higher among anglophones than francophones, since in 2015 17.26 of eligible anglophone voters
voted in elections to the anglophone school boards, compared with only 4.85 per
cent of francophones who voted in their similar contests.
Even in that tiny section to
which my family attached ourselves in 1969, Prof. Bourhis noted that in 2012
some 21,835 anglophones were enrolled in francophone schools. So maybe we could
argue that we were slightly ahead of the game. But unfortunately our move had
rather negative consequences for our children, since they were thrown into an
environment in which they knew not a word of French, and were not given much
help from the religion-oriented teachers in learning it.
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