Last year, a wing of Coalition Avenir Québec adopted a resolution in favour of making le vouvoiement mandatory in public schools.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
French immigrants to Quebec, whose numbers have risen sharply in recent years, generally do not have much difficulty adapting to the social manners of la belle province. Most find Quebec’s less deferential and more egalitarian mores a refreshing change from the more hierarchical and stuffier codes of conduct one is expected to follow in French society.
Still, many French immigrants are taken off guard by the degree of familiarity Quebeckers express with one another in their everyday lives. This typically manifests itself in the more common use of the familiar tu, rather than the more formal vous, even among strangers.
Le vouvoiement – the act of addressing someone as vous – is the default choice in France. It is mostly the opposite in Quebec, where le tutoiement prevails in schools and the workplace. Nor is it uncommon for sales clerks to tutoyer customers, especially if they look younger than them.
It was not always that way. Most francophone Quebeckers who grew up before the 1970s were taught to address even their parents by vous. The social hierarchy imposed by the Catholic Church made Quebeckers far more deferential than other Canadians. That all changed with the Quiet Revolution, which replaced Church power with people power.
In most French-language public schools in Quebec today, students address their teachers by their first names. No honorifics, no vouvoiement. Not everyone likes it. In recent years, conservative education critics have complained about the breakdown of authority and the rise in violence – not just between students but by students toward teachers.
At its annual convention last year, the youth wing of the governing Coalition Avenir Québec adopted a resolution in favour of making le vouvoiement mandatory in public schools. It was one of a series of recommendations, including a ban on cell phones, aimed at re-establishing decorum in public schools. Premier François Legault called it “a damn good idea” and instructed Education Minister Bernard Drainville to move forward with the plan.
“It is as if we have become a society where there are only rights and no obligations and no consequences,” Mr. Legault said. “The number of times one hears of cases of violence or intimidation toward students or teachers makes no sense.”
Last week, Mr. Drainville tabled draft regulations on new “rules of conduct in elementary and secondary schools” that will require students to address all adult personnel by “vous” starting in January. Under the measure, initially announced in May along with a cell-phone ban that is to take effect this fall, students will also be required to address teachers with “Monsieur” or “Madame” and not just their first names.
Education experts and unions have dismissed the plan as a step backward, insisting that le vouvoiement is not in and of itself a sign of respect and that making it mandatory in public schools will just burden teachers with one more behaviour to police. But parents’ committees have generally been supportive of the minister’s move.
Quebec has for decades recorded the highest high-school drop-out rates among Canadian provinces, with a much wider gap between male and female graduation rates than elsewhere in the country. Many observers blame the problem, at least in part, on a lack of authority in public schools. It is also cited as one of the reasons the rate of private-school attendance in Quebec, at 11.7 per cent according to one study, is almost twice that of Ontario. Many parents have simply given up on the public system.
Teacher unions insist the vouvoiement decree is just an attempt to distract attention from an underfunding crisis – including an estimated $570-million in education cuts this year – and that a lack of resources in the public system is the main reason many parents opt for private schools.
Still, le vouvoiement is part of the CAQ government’s broader effort to reverse a perceived free-for-all in public schools. Last year, revelations that teachers at one Montreal public school omitted aspects of the provincial curriculum that conflicted with their religion sparked a ministry investigation into similar conduct at 16 other schools.
Mr. Drainville responded to the findings by tabling Bill 94, which proposes to strengthen secularism in public schools, extending the current ban on the wearing of religious symbols by teachers to all school personnel. The bill, which is currently being studied by a National Assembly committee, establishes that “no one, being motivated by a religious conviction or belief, may influence or attempt to influence the exercise of a power or function or the performance of a duty or obligation provided for by the Education Act.”
Quebec students will probably have a harder time adjusting to the cell-phone ban than the new rule on vouvoiement, though both are certain to be unpopular with them.