In the debates about the decline of the French language and Quebec culture, a verb often comes up: “to dust”.
I think this raises a number of problems. Last example, a headline in La Presse yesterday: “French teachers want to dust off past participles. »
The article focused on French teachers’ complaints, which were forwarded to Education Minister Bernard Drainville.
The idea of no longer teaching exceptions to the agreement of past participles is not new. In 2019, Le Journal reported that French language experts such as Mario Désilets, French educator, and Marie-Éva de Villers, author of the Multidictionnaire, were in favor. Maybe we should go through this.
Given the dissatisfaction with French among the younger generation, the reflex is often to say that our language is too “complex”. Hence the craving for simplification, one of the avatars of “dusting off”.
A few years ago, the spelling reform had to be adopted as quickly as possible. The change from “Onion” to “Ognon”, the removal of circumflex accents (to know, etc.) promised to make French instantly irresistible. Did it work? Anyway, let’s do it again with the past participles.
The guilty
The ‘past’, the ‘dust’, is precisely what bothers us today: “If a student says to me: ‘Madame, I don’t understand why we allow it like that’, then I only give this answer. People had the rules 400 years ago set,” a teacher testified in La Presse.
Will allowing “in gender and number the past participle used with avoir to no longer agree when the direct complement is placed before the verb?” will it really slow down the decline of French?”
I doubt. It seems to me that the deep sources of decline lie elsewhere. First in the omnipresence and omnipotence of, among other things, American or English-language digital applications and platforms.
But also in our exuberant passion for “dusting”.
In March Ministers Drainville and Lacombe (Culture) visited a school to discuss French. Students, it seems, welcomed the idea of ”using Quebec books, songs and films to learn French.” Oh joy!
But several young people “insisted that the proposed works be contemporary”. Minister Mathieu Lacombe declared himself “sensitive to this”.
Our time has decided that it has nothing to learn from the past, which it casts a contemptuous eye on: it is for it a “great darkness”, the only otherness that perhaps deserves an attitude of closure.
However, “since the world is old, always older than [les élèves]the fact of learning is inevitably turned towards the past,” emphasized the philosopher Hannah Arendt.
In today’s world, adults, ministers, it seems, are willing to give in to customer targeting (“that’s what young people want”), to throw culture with the doordust. On the contrary, preoccupation with the past, with the works it has left us, could nevertheless give a rich meaning to learning and develop a critical spirit towards our time.
