Once again, please allow me to blow off steam on the endemic misfortune of the French language in Quebec.
• Also read: French in Quebec, an endangered species in government eyes
• Also read: Mr. Legault, where is Quebec headed?
So we learned a few weeks ago that CEGEP French teachers have no intention of teaching grammar. They don’t want to hold back students who express themselves by stuffing their language with vocabulary mistakes, using words the wrong way round, having trouble articulating their thoughts and – it’s fashionable – their language with words from trendy English stuff up, as we hear in the government ad designed to amuse us.
I understand that experienced French teachers teaching in CEGEP are reluctant to teach the basics of grammar to young adults who have unfortunately been betrayed by the leading educators of the past. We know that certain educators from generation to generation have deprived primary and secondary school children of the fundamental right to learn their mother tongue by the rules of the art and not as the result of a revolution.
We should denounce these iconoclasts who are said to be at the forefront of pedagogy. They have developed language teaching programs that bully young people who have been verbally disabled for decades.
catastrophe
It’s not catastrophic, it’s catastrophic. In the late 1950s, Brother Untel denounced Joual, this systematic deformation of normative French, and sold 150,000 copies of his brochure Les Insolences du Frère Untel.
But Michel Tremblay, one of our great writers, appropriated the Joual by enlarging it. But he doesn’t think together. He expresses himself personally in fine language because he is well read.
Today’s youth is an orphan of French due to the madness of supposed specialists who impose daily dictation on primary school children.
In this way, generations of young people had learned to read and write French, not without effort and not without sometimes feeling inadequate, from which they later benefited to the fullest.
My own aunts, who had only been going to school five or six years, were proud of her. They loved to read aloud often, to show that despite the poverty they had grown up in, they were not ignorant.
Our heritage
The language is handed down to us as an inheritance. How can we still tolerate the poor quality of what is taught in schools today?
It is not the child who teaches himself and has to decide how to use the French language. This language is demanding, difficult. French-speaking Quebecers, drowned in an English-speaking North America, are not allowed to bend French to their personal whims. “I speak how I want to speak” is a silly remark.
“It’s a beautiful language with great words,” sings Yves Duteil. It is a language that grows within us, enchants and moves us. Therefore, she makes herself desirable by enforcing her demands.
We can offend him, let him down, but the price to be paid will be high. Because we will lose the memory of what we have become. Personally and collectively.
