By Nick Fonda
Local Journalism Initiative
The announcement that half a billion dollars was being cut from Quebec’s education budget was greeted with a mixture of shock and dismay (Record, June 20). The all too plausible reason, as explained in Sharon McCully’s editorial (June 25), was a correspondingly large and unexpected expense incurred by the government’s auto insurance program (SAAQ) that had to be covered. When the shoe fits…
Still, a question remains: why cut from education? If money has to be found, why not cut a percentage—the same percentage—from all of the bureaucracy’s budgets and cover the cost that way? Why take the $510M needed for the SAAQ from education?
Just to put half a billion dollars into context, the Quebec government’s budget for 2025-26 is $130.6B. Of this sum, $57B goes to health care and social services while $19.8B goes to public education with another $8.9B going to higher education. Together, health and education represent about two-thirds of the province’s spending. As well, Quebec has a $13B deficit, so trimming half a billion is easy to justify. And while half a billion dollars is a lot of money, it is a mathematically modest 2.5% of the public education budget.
Modest as the cut is, the question remains, why cut from education?
One possible answer comes from data compiled by the Fraser Institute. In 2021-22, Quebec invested more money educating its youth than any other province, spending an average of $17, 374 per student. At the other end of the spectrum, Alberta spent $13, 421 per student, only 75 per cent of what Quebec spent. Cutting half a billion dollars from the education budget puts Quebec’s per-student costs closer to the norm while still leaving it near the top (if not still at the top) in terms of spending on education.
A second, and less plausible, answer might be deduced from the perception that François Legault’s CAQ government is taking a business-like approach to education. In business, a job well done is rewarded with a bonus. A job poorly done is examined to find the flaw and correct it before putting more money into the venture. If the education budget has been cut, is it because public education is, in some way, falling short? For that matter, how exactly can something like public education be judged or evaluated?
About 20 years ago, I was a classroom teacher with three decades of experience.
I lived through what I refer to as the Great Dumbing Down (GDD). This was a shift of seismic proportions that turned the concept of learning on its head. It occurred over a span of more than a dozen years and began with the introduction of a new methodology with its own jargon. What had previously been referred to as English became English Language Arts, which certainly sounds impressive. Changes to the English curriculum were followed by changes to Math, and all the other subjects, right down to Phys Ed. The GDD began in the 1980s and culminated with the full implementation of the Quebec Educational Reform at the turn of the 21st century. Despite the name, the new education system had nothing to do with Quebec. It was an American initiative and it spread to most First World countries.
I had the experience of watching kids learn both before and after the GDD.
Before the GDD, classroom furniture consisted of desks arranged in rows with every child assigned to his own desk. Post-GDD classroom furniture consists of chairs set around tables that accommodate anywhere from three to six or more students. Pre-GDD, if the classroom wasn’t perfectly quiet, there would be only one person speaking, most often the teacher. After the GDD any number of people will be talking at the same time, often (but not always) in their quiet voices. Teachers, pre-GDD, frequently repeated the instruction, think for yourself! Post-GDD, their most common refrain is, how do the others in your group feel about that?
Textbooks changed. Pre-GDD Grade 5 Math textbooks included a chapter on adding fractions. The method was concisely explained: find a common denominator, convert the fractions to that denominator, add the numerators but not the denominators, and convert your answer to a mixed number. This was followed by a couple of examples: to add one-half and two-thirds convert the factions to three-sixths and four-sixths; add three and four to get seven- sixths, and convert that improper fraction to one and one sixth. The rest of the chapter was all addition problems—pages and pages of fractions and mixed numbers to practice adding.
The chapter on adding fractions in Grade 5 Math textbooks at the turn of the 21st century was quite different. The textbooks themselves were in larger formats than their 20th century counterparts, but with fewer pages. They were printed on glossy paper and, unlike the older books, the post-GDD texts were full of eye-catching graphics. One or two pages would be taken just to visually introduce the topic. The instructions—artfully enhanced—would take another page or two rather than a half page in the old textbooks. There weren’t as many pages of problems to work on as in the older books, and there weren’t quite so many problems on those pages.
If practice makes perfect, Grade 5 students pre-GDD had five or ten times as much chance of achieving perfection.
Before the GDD, the high school leaving Composition exam lasted three hours. Half of the marks on the exam were earned on right-or-wrong answers. For example, a student would be asked which, among eight or ten short samples, were sentences. He would then be asked to change the sentence fragments into complete sentences. He would be asked to parse some sentences, and show that he knew the meanings of certain words. The other half of the exam asked for one short and one longer writing sample in two different modes: narrative, expository, persuasive, or personal essay.
After the GDD the same exam was administered over several of days. The right-or wrong part of the exam—wonderfully unambiguous for teachers to mark—was dropped. The composition exam still asked for writing samples but these had to go through a peer editing process and then a re-write. Teachers had to judge the student’s final draft but also take into consideration the changes and improvements from the first draft.
Judging a piece of writing is a dicey affair at the best of times. A piece of writing might be brilliant, but if the reader isn’t receptive, he won’t rate it highly. By way of example, the first Harry Potter novel was turned down by several publishers before it went on to make J.K. Rowling very rich and famous. In the pre-GDD days, asking students to show their knowledge of grammar, or the extent of their vocabulary, was a way to compensate for the writer who was up against an unreceptive reader.
As to whether the Ministry of Education is doing a good job, the answers are all anecdotal. One comes from a professor at Bishop’s who pointed out that his students can’t read any more. Another comes from a factory owner who needed a manager to oversee an operation that employed 400 people. After interviewing a dozen candidates with MBAs, he hired an English major with an M.A. because he needed a manager who could write and analyze. A third comes from a teacher just starting out who said, I have a degree in Education but I feel as if I don’t know anything.
Not that any of this anecdotal evidence proves that the education system isn’t doing what was intended.
In the first half of the 20th century, many people still lived on small farms. Many more people than today were self-employed or operated small businesses. They had to be resourceful, able to solve their problems quickly and efficiently. They had to think for themselves.
Today we have big corporations, multinationals, and the 1%. Employees are hired (when robots aren’t available) to do a job, not to think.
Is it possible then, that the Ministry of Education is not doing a good job and simultaneously doing exactly the job it set out to do? And how could that explain a 2.5% cut?
No, it’s easier to stick to the Fraser Institute’s study and bet that cutting half a billion dollars from the education budget was doing no more than bringing Quebec more into line with what other provinces are spending on schools.
It was just happenstance that the half a billion dollars cut from education was exactly the sum needed to cover that unexpected shortfall at the SAAQ.