Multiple Division

At the cégep, or college, where I teach just outside of Montreal, a few students each semester confide in me which secondary school they attended, as though this information should explain all their triumphs or failures. They may as well be speaking in code. I grew up in the prairies, and while I’ve learned the basics of Quebec’s educational system, where the equivalent of high school includes grades 7 to 11, I know little about the reputations of specific establishments. That said, these teenagers are right to think that there’s a hierarchy. Quebec may have some of the cheapest university tuition in Canada, but it also has the secondary school system that’s the most unequal.

Christophe Allaire Sévigny denounces this state of affairs in Séparés mais égaux: Enquête sur la ségrégation scolaire au Québec (Separate but equal: Investigation into school segregation in Quebec), which recently won the Prix Pierre-Vadeboncoeur. His target is the “école à trois vitesses,” the three-tiered system that sees 21 percent of the province’s secondary students opt for private schools and another 19 percent sign up for selective public programs, such as elite sports or the International Baccalaureate. (The Canada-wide average for private school attendance is far lower, between 7 and 8 percent.) Those left behind in the regular sector are disproportionately poor, more likely to have learning disabilities, and far less likely to attend university.

For Allaire Sévigny, this situation is nothing less than a betrayal of the ideals of the Quiet Revolution. Rather than promote equality, the current education system reinforces socio-economic hierarchies and relationships of “division, exclusion, and disdain.” An early chapter thus features students staring out the classroom window as their peers use a state-of-the-art obstacle course. Such amenities are reserved for those in the school’s sports programs, which cost between $1,000 and $5,000 a year. “How could these youth, who watched their comrades enjoying new equipment while knowing it was beyond their grasp, not feel like they were considered second-class students?” Allaire Sévigny asks. As for their teacher, “he did not choose this career to pass on this shame.”

The overhaul of the province’s education system in the 1960s was meant to undo such divides. Francophone schools were historically the purview of the Catholic Church. A small elite attended classical colleges where students learned Latin and Greek and were so cut off from the general population that they developed distinctive speech patterns. In 1961, the Parent Commission set out to create a modern, secular system that would serve the majority by promoting equality and social solidarity. Yet pressure from the clergy led the commission’s appointed experts to recommend subsidized private schools, thereby placing a “time bomb at the heart of these reforms.” Enrolment in the private system began to rise in the 1970s. To this day, private schools receive public funding (although only 60 percent as much as public schools get), such that poor taxpayers “finance their own social exclusion.” The last three decades, meanwhile, have seen the public sector increasingly turn to “projets pédagogiques particuliers,” or specialized enrichment programs, in order to compete. Because few are free, PPPs further index educational access to the socio-economic status of parents.

The divisions have troubling consequences. At one school, fights break out between students in the regular stream and their wealthier peers in the “sports-study” program. Privileged parents, meanwhile, adopt the mentality of consumers. Allaire Sévigny recounts a meeting where his daughter’s principal informed parents that their children, enrolled in a shrinking theatre program, would now need to take some classes with the regular stream. “How much more would it cost us to ensure that our children stay with just each other?” one man asked. To Allaire Sévigny’s shock, several others latched on to the idea. The principal had to explain that they could not pay to change the organization of a public school, adding, “as if it were not already obvious, that the regular students also deserve respect.”

Uncomfortable as such scenes may be, comparing them to racial segregation strains credulity. Allaire Sévigny borrows the term “segregation” from the sociologist Guy Rocher, a founding member of the Parent Commission and a critic of the current system. (In a charming episode, Rocher agreed to be interviewed for the book and the author nervously waited for his intellectual hero to call.) But Allaire Sévigny also insists on drawing parallels between Quebec’s system and the American South. For instance, he cites the United States Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 ruling that found racial segregation in public schools violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, as evidence that “separation destroys equality and threatens civic life.” It’s a reasonable point, but then he makes the absurd claim that “whether segregation is based on racism or simply on the freedom of economic choice changes nothing.” He also quotes W. E. B. Du Bois’s declaration that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line” in order to argue that the same is now true of class in Quebec. These analogies trivialize histories of racial oppression by equating a private school charging tuition with the violence of Jim Crow. Poor Quebeckers do not risk being murdered when they push for better schooling.

Exacerbating this flaw is Allaire Sévigny’s neglect of contemporary racial and cultural dynamics. Based in Sherbrooke, the author only glancingly discusses Montreal, which has the highest rate of private secondary school enrolment, at 34 percent. Yet it is in the province’s largest city that class and race most closely overlap, with recent immigrants concentrated in the public system as more affluent white Quebeckers opt out. Nor does Allaire Sévigny address Bill 21, the controversial Act Respecting the Laicity of the State passed in 2019, which bars public school teachers from wearing religious symbols. Those rules have recently been extended to the majority of public school and daycare employees.

Allaire Sévigny’s analysis of the three-tiered system also runs together two debates that might benefit from being separated: whether streaming should be based on families’ ability to pay and whether it should be based on academic performance. The former involves a straightforward replica of class barriers, while the latter is more complicated. Allaire Sévigny dutifully cites the research that finds mixed-level classes “have a positive effect on the success of weaker students without negatively affecting the success of the stronger.” But he also evokes an implicit counter-example: the elimination of schools for those with special needs in the name of integration. As a result, a startling 40 percent of students in some regular classrooms may have a diagnosed learning disability, leaving teachers overwhelmed. While Allaire Sévigny is clearly opposed to siphoning off high-performing students into separate classes, he is more circumspect about those with special needs. The winning formula for classroom composition may not be so obvious, as society balances the cultivation of excellence, the forging of solidarity, and the necessity of keeping teachers’ workloads manageable.

The goal of Séparés mais égaux is not to propose solutions but to “increase the discomfort” with the status quo. In that regard, the book is successful. The writing is also consistently clever, as when the author introduces himself as a “sociologist, college teacher, and father of four children (in real life, that order is reversed).” Still, I found myself yearning for some policy proposals. Should private schools be cut off from public funding, or should they be integrated into the public system? Should specialized programs be retooled, such that dance is offered as an option rather than a track? Has the inclusion of the weakest students been pushed too far? Comparisons with other provinces could have helped here: Ontario recently eliminated streaming in grade 9, while “classroom complexity” was a major issue in the recent teachers’ strike in Alberta.

Perhaps my blindness to secondary school prestige is a strength in my cégep job. Quebec’s colleges are another legacy of the Parent Commission, marked by the same idealism: young people preparing for university and those completing technical degrees study alongside one another for minimal tuition. Because literature is designated “general education,” my classes contain students from all programs, with widely varying writing abilities. Viewed through Allaire Sévigny’s work, dealing with this range is not simply a headache. Rather, it is an exercise in cross-class solidarity that aims to undo some of the stratification that was imposed on my students by their earlier schooling.