We have termites in our educational system.

Just when you thought it was safe to come back to Quebec with our new Liberal government and all, the Eastern Townships School Board, the English school board, for crissakes, has thrown a monkey wrench into the works and gotten teachers� and parents� hackles up.

For those of you who are not familiar with Quebec education law, better known as Bill 101, the only children who may take instruction in English in the public school system are children who have a Certificate of Eligibility, meaning that one of their parents had a large chunk of his/her schooling in English in Quebec/Canada. Otherwise, they are obligated by law to go to school in French! This wouldn�t be so bad if English instruction in French schools wasn�t such a joke, but it�s really hard on immigrants to Quebec from d�ailleurs who want their kids to study in English. For example, if you emigrated here from the U.S.A. and wanted to put your kids in public school, it would have to be a French school. If you came from Zambia, it would be la m�me chose.

Before my daughter was of school age I made the pilgrimage to my elementary school in Toronto, Bialik Hebrew Day School, where the languages of instruction were English and Hebrew. I got the principal to sign a letter stating that the main provincial curriculum had been taught in English, so that my kids would qualify for a Certificate of Eligibility. Now here�s the funny part. We didn�t send our kids to English elementary school past kindergarten. They were enrolled at the English school for its bilingual kindergarten programme, then switched to the French school for grades 1 to 6 because, as English-speaking Quebeckers holding onto Certificates of Eligibility, they had a choice in their language of instruction and I sure as hell wanted to make sure that they turned out bilingual. That�s right, boys and girls. It is only the French-speaking majority in this province who are discriminated against in that they cannot choose the language of instruction for their children.

As you can imagine, this creates problems. They don�t learn much English in school, and many of them end up at English CEGEPs because that is the first opportunity for many of them to go to school in that language. By then they are perhaps 17 years old, a little late to develop fluency in a second language. The government has even talked about closing that loophole and making them stay in the French system past high school, but that definitely will not fly.

Anyway, to get back to the problem at hand. The ETSB has introduced an initiative to increase French instruction from 300 to 450 minutes per week (basically a half-hour more per day). In order to do this, it would be necessary to start teaching non-French subjects (i.e. math, science) in French. In high school, both my kids were/are in the langue maternelle programme, meaning they took/take the most advanced French course aimed at kids whose mother tongue is French, and their social studies (g�ographie or histoire) up to the second half of grade 9. There are plenty in that programme, kids who come from families of mixed parentage or who have also attended French schools as our kids did. My children (not to boast here) have consistently done better than others whose mother tongue is French, because the quality of education in the French elementary schools is superior to that in the English.

Most anglophones, though (that is the official term here, so I guess I�ll use it), do not have sufficient French to be able to suddenly switch to that language in a different subject. Neither do their teachers. Not only that, but this initiative has been introduced in some elementary schools, and it was found that the English of many of these kids, which isn�t great shakes to begin with, has suffered. They are graduating from grade 6, but reading at a grade 4 level. This bears out right through, if the essays my husband has to mark are any indication. If the ETSB forces this initiative, there will be a lot more graduates from high school who cannot communicate effectively in their mother tongue (or father tongue, whichever the case). This is a bad thing and should not be allowed to happen. I�m not concerned for my son (the only one left in high school) because he is already doing g�ographie and and he�s brilliant to boot. Switching to French in biology might be a problem at the start, but he would adapt and probably rise to the challenge. But what about those kids who are just struggling with the subject matter in English, and are faced with learning it in a language in which they are not proficient? They will all fail, miserably! I can understand the rising hackles on teachers� and parents� necks. We thought our rights as a minority group in this province were enshrined. I didn�t realize that we were being undermined from within.

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