Chapter Title: Literary history in the curriculum Book Title: What is Québécois

Chapter Title: Literary history in the curriculum Book Title: What is Québécois Literature? Book Subtitle: Reflections on the Literary History of Francophone Writing in Canada Book Author(s): ROSEMARY CHAPMAN Published by: Liverpool University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vjfm8.8 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Liverpool University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to What is Québécois Literature? This content downloaded from 197.89.38.252 on Thu, 11 Aug 2022 13:14:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms chapter two Literary history in the curriculum Literary history in the curriculum As has been seen in the previous chapter, the function of published volumes of literary history is primarily pedagogical, in that they present literature as an object of study that can be classified (whether by genre, or by school, movement or tendency) and framed in terms of its historical development. Expanding on Barthes’s statement concerning the relationship between French literature and literary history, ‘La littérature, c’est ce qui s’enseigne’,1 Véronique Bonnet argues that ‘l’école constitue un appareil transmettant une image normative de la littérature, posant un modèle de culture “légitime” qui joue un rôle signifiant dans le fonctionnement du champ littéraire’.2 In any former settler colony, ‘ce qui s’enseigne’ will reflect two sets of cultural norms, of varying degrees of legitimacy. In Quebec’s case this expresses itself in a complex and at times conflicted relationship to the literary history of the former colonial centre and a commitment to the development of a distinctive, national literature. The changing patterns of which literary history/ies should be taught in schools and how that material is taught reflect changes in the control of education, in attitudes towards cultural legitimacy, in pedagogical thinking, and in the very concept of nation that has prevailed at different periods of the twentieth century. Literary history, in common with all other bodies of knowledge, plays its part in transmitting a set of official values, beliefs and structures, and like the curriculum within which it is studied, it is a product of its time and its place. In his reflections on the relationship between the curriculum, the nation and postcolonialism George Richardson stresses ‘the importance of understanding that school curricula reflect cultural biases and speak from particular cultural locations’.3 Literary history is mediated in a number of ways within the education system, from the structures and methodologies imposed by the curriculum, to the introductions and annotations in textbooks and anthologies, to Chapman, What is Québécois Literature.indd 103 30/07/2013 09:17:03 This content downloaded from 197.89.38.252 on Thu, 11 Aug 2022 13:14:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms What is Québécois Literature? 104 the choice of set texts as well as the judgements of teachers and critics, and cultural biases will emerge at each of these levels at which the curriculum is delivered. This chapter will focus primarily on the incorporation of francophone Canadian literature as an object of study in the curriculum of French- language schools in Quebec and will draw on curriculum documents, material submitted to the Parent Commission, the Parent Report, as well as material relating to examinations. After an introductory section on the situation of French-language education in Quebec, successive sections will discuss the teaching of literature in Quebec from 1900 to 1960, the findings and recommendations of the Parent Report in the 1960s, developments in the curriculum from the 1960s onwards, and a consideration of the place of francophone Canadian literature in the curriculum today, both within and beyond Quebec.4 French-language education in Quebec The way in which literature has been taught over the last hundred years or so in Quebec, at different levels of the education system, first under the denominational system, from 1964 within the Ministry of Education, and since 2005 as part of the expanded Ministry of Education, Leisure and Sport (MELS), reflects many of the pressures and influences at work in the construction of the curriculum. A curriculum is always developing, and as such negotiating a path which continues and adapts various traditions and dominant ways of thinking as new challenges, emphases and contexts emerge. It works within an educational system which itself is the product of layers of influence and power, whether these are ideological, religious, political or economic. Quebec’s particular history of invasion and settlement under French colonial and then British colonial rule has produced an education system the structure of which has always been different from that of any of the other provinces in Canada. Compulsory schooling arrived later in Quebec than in the other provinces, finally being introduced for ages 6–14, together with free elementary schooling (Grades 1–7), under Adélard Godbout’s Liberal government in 1943.5 Philip Oreopoulos points out that while legislation had been passed much earlier in most other provinces, school attendance elsewhere in Canada remained generally low: ‘The average daily attendance rate (among those enrolled) for the whole of Canada was 61 per cent in 1900. The number of years Chapman, What is Québécois Literature.indd 104 30/07/2013 09:17:03 This content downloaded from 197.89.38.252 on Thu, 11 Aug 2022 13:14:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Literary history in the curriculum 105 typically spent in school were also few. Both boys and girls often left at the age of nine or ten to begin work in factories or at home.’6 By 1929 in Quebec only 24 per cent of francophone pupils progressed beyond the primary phase (Years 1–6), and many completed no more than four years of schooling. At the end of the Second World War some progress had been made, with 46 per cent completing the primary stage (by then comprising Years 1–7), 25 per cent completing Year 8 and 17 per cent completing Year 9. However, a mere 2 per cent finished the full 12-year course introduced in 1929.7 lf in twentieth-century Quebec resistance to compulsory school attendance had come from the Catholic Church, which refused to contemplate any threat to its control of education and other social institutions, in the nineteenth century there had been other obstacles. Indeed, Serge Gagnon’s work on the elementary school in Quebec in the nineteenth century points out that compulsory education was held back not so much by the conservatism of the Catholic Church as by the economic exploitation of the working-class francophone population as a source of cheap labour for the anglophone bourgeoisie. This prompts him to ask ‘si la sous-scolarisation des Québécois de langue française ne serait pas, en définitif, l’un des nombreux effets de son statut “colonial”’.8 Quebec’s resistance to compulsory education had other important effects: centralized examinations were only introduced in Quebec in 1932, initially on a trial basis, and were not fully centralized until 1938, despite the inspectorate having lobbied for this since the mid-nineteenth century with the aim of ensuring consistency of provision and standards across the province.9 The secondary sector was very slow to develop and was highly hierarchical, the academic route for pupils intending to continue study at university or to enter the professions being dominated by the collège classique, based on the Jesuit model of classical humanities education, and a distinctive feature of education in Quebec prior to the Révolution tranquille. As Claude Galarneau argues, the establishment of the collège classique in New France was an intrinsic part of the colonizing mission: ‘L’administration civile et militaire, le régime seigneurial, les pratiques économiques, les techniques artisanales, tout devait être installé à la manière de France […] et l’enseignement ne fait pas exception.’10 But while the collèges were indeed directly modelled on Jesuit colleges in France, they were part of a wider tradition of education which far outlived the actual period of colonial contact. Under the denominational system of education the Church was able to maintain a strict segregation between the highly academic secondary education of the collèges, Chapman, What is Québécois Literature.indd 105 30/07/2013 09:17:03 This content downloaded from 197.89.38.252 on Thu, 11 Aug 2022 13:14:40 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms What is Québécois Literature? 106 which trained a small elite for the priesthood and certain professions, and a public provision, which was designed not to compete with the collèges. The system was not only highly elitist, it also discriminated against girls. Not until 1908 was the Congrégation de Notre-Dame in Montreal permitted to offer the first cours classique for girls. This elitism and inequality persisted with the result that by 1953 only 8 per cent of boys and a mere 1 per cent of girls in Quebec followed the cours classique.11 The curriculum that was followed in the collèges was the Ratio Atque Institutio uploads/Litterature/literary-history-in-the-curriculum.pdf

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