The author operates at the crossroads of culture and public affairs. Former French language commissioner for the City of Montreal, she held strategic positions with the governments of Quebec and Canada, particularly in matters of Francophonie.
Recently, Quebec’s Minister of Education, Sonia LeBel, announced a major reform in the financing of educational establishments – the most important since the creation of the ministry in 1964. The objective: to simplify budgetary rules, reduce the number of envelopes granted and offer more flexibility to school service centers.
We now know the result. The amounts formerly reserved for cultural outings, books and the Culture at School program are now integrated into a vast category entitled “Special educational projects, sporting, cultural and social activities”. Officially, the budgets are maintained. But arbitrations will now be left to the discretion of the different school service centers.
Obviously, some administrative relief was necessary. Obviously also, sport and physical activity play an essential role and must be supported, promoted and encouraged from an early age. The problem is not there. It lies rather in what this reform reveals about the place given to culture in our very conception of school.
Because culture is not a particular educational project. Neither does the book. They do not constitute activities among others, which are juxtaposed with a series of options within a vast budgetary envelope. They participate in something more fundamental: the transmission of a language, of a collective imagination, of a relationship with the world. They shape the feeling of belonging, nourish curiosity and critical thinking, and allow the meeting of different ideas, works and sensitivities.
In other words, the real issue is not only budgetary. It is also symbolic. The way in which a society categorizes culture testifies to the role it recognizes for it – and, in turn, to the collective importance it accords it.
A paradox
For several years, Quebec has multiplied debates and interventions aimed at the protection of French, Quebec culture and certain collective markers. These discussions occupy an important place in our public space and reflect very real concerns. But the protection and vitality of a culture do not rest solely on laws, regulations or normative frameworks. They also pass – and perhaps above all – through transmission.
However, in this regard, school plays a fundamental role. If we wish to develop in young people a taste for language and creation, and to form citizens who are curious, critical and open to the world, and if we also wish to offer a counterweight to the omnipresence of screens and digital platforms, then school libraries, meetings with creators, outings to theatre, museum or book fair cannot be considered accessories.
They constitute essential vectors of cultural transmission.
Several European companies also seem to have fully integrated this reality. In France, as in several Nordic countries, cultural education occupies an important place in the educational journey – a reflection which was also at the heart of the first Pan-Canadian Summit on artistic education, held recently in Ottawa by the French-Canadian Cultural Federation. Structured partnerships with libraries, museums and cultural institutions allow young people to attend works from childhood. Culture does not appear as a peripheral or optional activity, but as an essential component of citizenship training.
Let us understand clearly: it is not a question of opposing culture and physical activity. Both meet real and complementary needs. But they do not play the same role in the construction of the relationship to language, identity and collective memory.
This is why an envelope reserved for culture has a scope which goes far beyond the sole accounting issue. It protects, prioritizes and sends a clear political signal. It asserts that a society considers certain transmission tools as essential enough to grant them a distinct place.
Quebec could have taken advantage of this reform to assert a strong vision of culture at school and more explicitly recognize the structuring role of reading, books and cultural attendance in the careers of young people. Instead, it favored a logic of simplification and administrative flexibility, leaving local entities to arbitrate their distribution, with the risk that access to certain cultural experiences varies from one environment to another.
However, a society establishes its priorities by what it explicitly chooses to protect.
