What is the goal of education? Is it to enrich the lives of students? To provide them with the skills needed to succeed and excel in the modern world? To ensure they have access to a high quality of life once they graduate? Most would say “yes” to all of these questions. Indeed, we would be remiss to claim that the goal of education was anything but. Then why as a society have we allowed our education system to be hijacked by nationalism rather than embracing positions that would achieve these goals?
Montreal’s public school board has just introduced a new program that would bring in hall and playground monitors to ensure no student is speaking anything but French outside of class. Quebec’s long-established Bill 101 mandates that all children of immigrants attend French-language schools. The justification for now instituting language monitors is that it will help ensure that immigrant children are fluent in French. Indeed, it must be conceded that these children would suffer if they were not sufficiently educated in French, since that is the language of Quebec and, thus, integral to their quality of life in that province.
Quebec’s Bill 101 was adopted because of a fear that, given the option, too many immigrant families would send their children to English-language schools, which would dilute the Francophone population of Quebec. For many Quebecers — and certainly most of Quebec’s politicians — the desire to keep French in the majority was greater than the desire to ready students for the demands of a globalized world. It makes sense that immigrant parents would want their children to attend an English-language school, after all, English is the de facto global language, and anyone fluent in it has a leg up in the global economy. Yet to Quebecers, the desire to maintain their language means more than any economic or educational bonus. While this style of thinking clearly still exists within Quebec, the actions of the Montreal school board should make the rest of us in English Canada seriously examine how we handle language education and if we too are blinded by nationalism.
In Ontario, it is a requirement that French be taken in middle school and at least for one year of high school. In my own high school, Latin and German were also offered for anyone who desired to take them. However, none of these languages are integral to the future of the global economy — and one has not been important since the fall of the Roman Empire. Language education, then, should have an eye towards what languages are going to dominate the future and provide those who speak them with additional economic clout.
In this regard, Utah leads the pack. Over the past several years, the beehive state has instituted the most rigorous Mandarin Chinese and Arabic language education programs in the developed world. This makes sense: China is already a giant economically and is predicted to overtake the United States within the next decade or so. With huge reserves of oil wealth, exploding populations and many new, blooming democracies, the Arab world is set to hold much power on the global stage in the coming years. Setting students up with the skills to communicate with — and, thus, understand more deeply — these societies will give them boundless advantages over those who do not have such skills.
Unfortunately for the French language, however, none of the countries it dominates appear to be in a position to dominate the world anytime soon. France has a collapsing population and an anemic economy. In many of the African countries that hold it as their language of government, the languages of trade and culture are decidedly not French; and many of the Caribbean islands where it is spoken by the majority are closely tied to China through financial and foreign aid.
It is our responsibility as a society, then, to shift our focus from the French language education system to those languages that will better position the youth of this country to meet the demands and challenges of the coming years. Language education, as with all education, should focus on equipping students for the future rather than clinging to nationalist ideals of the past.
