Quebec Education Minister Bernard Drainville says he wants to improve civility in the province’s schools by requiring students to address their teachers using a title, such as Mr. or Ms., as well as the more formal and polite form of ‘you’ in French — vous rather than tu.
Schools will also have an obligation to formalize the value of respect in their codes of conduct and parents will have to sign that code to ensure they are aware of it.
Using vous is a sign of respect, Drainville said during a Friday interview on Radio-Canada’s Tout un matin French radio show.
“I think we need that in schools right now,” he said, adding it’s about respecting adults and respecting one’s function and the institution it represents.
Drainville acknowledged that using vous wasn’t like “waving a magic wand,” but said it was only one of many measures to improve the climate in schools across the province. The measure came alongside the announcement of a full ban on cellphones in schools starting next school year.
Full cellphone ban part of new ‘civility’ rules in Quebec schools
Robert Green, a social sciences teacher at Westmount High School on the island of Montreal, said the minister’s announcement left him feeling frustrated. Ultimately, he feels it should be up to teachers to decide what they’d prefer to be called.
“If a teacher feels that, I don’t know, using their first name in class helps them establish a better rapport with their students, that should be up to their professional judgment to decide this,” he said.
The Fédération des syndicats de l’enseignement (FSE-CSQ), a federation of unions representing some 95,000 teachers in the province, is of the same opinion.
FSE-CSQ spokesperson Sylvie Lemieux said the federation wasn’t against the use of titles or vous, but said that it shouldn’t be mandated.
“It should be left up to each teacher to establish a relationship with their students,” she said.
Furthermore, most teachers feel the use of vous wouldn’t do much to address the problem of incivility in schools, according to a survey conducted by the FSE-CSQ last year.
Of the more than 7,000 members who participated, only six per cent felt it could be an effective measure.
The same survey found that 83 per cent of teachers believe that incivility has increased over the past two years, with 56 per cent saying they experience incivility at least one to four times a day. Teachers also believe that incivility affects students’ concentration and reduces the time spent on learning.
Green said he feels there are more meaningful ways to tackle the issue and that structural problems such as class size need to be addressed.
Large classrooms, with 33 students or more, can be difficult to handle, he said.
“When students are packed into classes like that, behaviour issues inevitably arise … and the ability of teachers to kind of keep track of student behaviour and even establish a rapport with students is diminished,” Green said.
Steven Le Sueur, president of the Quebec Provincial Association of Teachers, worries about enforcing the new rules.
“We’re not in the 1950s … you’re going to send the kid home because he didn’t say Sir or Mr.?” he asked.
While Drainville said it would be left up to schools to decide what kind of discipline should be imposed for infringing the code of conduct, Le Sueur said it could create more work for teachers.
“Unless we get support from the parents, administration, school board, it’s falling on the teachers again. And it’s not like we don’t have enough to do,” he said.
