– Point –
Karen Fournier
With Action Démocratique leader Mario Dumont’s condemnation and a rally of 1,500 parents taking to the streets in protest, it’s safe to say that Quebec’s new mandatory ethics and religious culture class, introduced in September to replace the province’s traditional religion course, has come under intense public scrutiny.
Yet for all the controversy over this program, little has been said about what is actually being taught in our classrooms. It’s this very lack of understanding that impairs a segment of our province’s population from developing an open cultural frame of mind, and this could eventually become damaging to Quebec as a whole.
Three years in the making, the ethics and religious culture class is designed to reflect Quebec’s changing multicultural landscape. Taught in all elementary and secondary schools, the course focuses on the importance of Quebec’s Catholic and Protestant heritage, but also introduces key concepts from Judaism, Native spirituality and other major world religions. The class is meant to touch on social concepts like justice, happiness, as well as religious and secular laws, all in the goal of preparing children to express their cultural and ethical thoughts with respect.
After last year’s province-wide reasonable-accommodation debate over how best to integrate minority groups into Quebec society, which unfortunately often turned into a public arena for xenophobic and racist remarks, this class should be a welcome invitation to open our provincial collective consciousness to different cultures and ideas. However, a group of concerned parents has formed a coalition to protest the class, arguing that teaching young children different religions is a direct attack on Quebec’s identity. And unfortunately the ADQ has taken up the cause, giving a resistant minority a platform to express their misunderstanding of multiculturalism.
Speaking to 200 parents gathered in a school in Granby earlier this month, Dumont announced his party’s platform to temporarily put on hold and replace the class with an additional French class. The ADQ leader said the program had been thought up by the same people who “fight so there will be no Christmas trees in our classrooms. It’s the same people who want to make words like Easter disappear from our classrooms.”
Dumont also said the program was inspired by former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s conception of multiculturalism, which favoured bilingualism and ethnic pluralism. Dumont explained that multiculturalism in general was a “negation” of Quebec’s history. One might wonder what happened to Quebec’s history, which is populated with the Native and immigrant groups that formed this nation, if it has nothing to do with multiculturalism.
While these comments seem extraordinarily out of place in an open and modern society, unfortunately Dumont was catering his remarks to a base of 1,500 frustrated parents who had taken to Montreal’s streets in mid-October to demand their children be exempted from the class. As of October, the Ministry of Education had received over 1,100 demands for children to be exempted from the class. One couple from Drummondville is already suing the school board and the government over the matter. They say the program will create confusion between God, Allah and Buddha in students’ minds. Perhaps they didn’t read the program’s objectives properly.
If anything, the new class will add to students’ general knowledge, but it runs much deeper than that. Université du Québec
