Do you remember when politeness in our schools was a common feature? Students treated authority figures like teachers, principals and others with a certain amount of respect and dignity. While this sentiment hasn’t completely disappeared in the public and private school systems, it’s fair to say that it’s at a much lower point now than ever before.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could raise the standards in public and private schools once more? An experiment in one province, if successful, could do just that.
The Quebec government recently reintroduced a more formal way to address peers and authority figures in provincial schools. The main focus will be French language institutions in la belle province. There will be a switch back to the formal “vous” as opposed to the informal “tu” when speaking to family and friends, according to CTV News Montreal videojournalist Stephane Giroux’s Jan. 6 piece, along with the return of “monsieur” and “madame” in the classrooms.
This strategy was first announced in Quebec last May. “I think we need that in schools right now,” Education Minister Bernard Drainville said during an interview on Radio-Canada’s Tout un matin. While Drainville acknowledged the change to using “vous” wouldn’t be like “waving a magic wand,” he believed it would help improve the school climate similar to the provincial ban of cellphones in Quebec schools.
What has the reaction been like from teachers in Quebec schools?
Some have been positive. “I taught for 23 years at the high school level on the island of Montreal, and I used to ask my students to call me Heidi, and they had a hard time,” Heidi Yetman, President of the Quebec Provincial Association of Teachers, said to Giroux. “They would say [M]iss Heidi or Ms., so I think that’s already pretty much installed in many schools. I don’t think that’s going to be too difficult.” Similarly, French teacher Francois Limoget told CTV last year, “You’re probably better off using vous.”
There has been some pushback, too.
“It’s already established that you speak to your elementary school teacher using vous,” Teachers Union Federation president Richard Bergevin told Giroux, and “if we don’t have enough adults in the room, we won’t be able to change behaviours.” Yetman, in spite of her above comments, took a different tact when it came to the decision-making process. “I always say leave it up to the teachers,” she said. “The teachers know best and each teacher has a different way of teaching, a way of developing relationships with their students.”
Fédération des syndicats de l’enseignement (FSE-CSQ) spokesperson Sylvie Lemieux echoed this sentiment to CBC News’s Annabelle Olivier last May. She suggested in an interview that “it should be left up to each teacher to establish a relationship with their students.” Robert Green, a social sciences teacher at Montreal’s Westmount High School, said ”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.” There’s also Steven Le Sueur, President of the Quebec Provincial Association of Teachers, who actually made this remark to Olivier, “We’re not in the 1950s … you’re going to send the kid home because he didn’t say Sir or Mr.?”
Guess what? Maybe they should.
While it may sound a bit old-fashioned to some readers, the increased use of formal address and politeness would be a good thing in any language. Considering the disrespect and lack of manners that some young people have for adults, teachers and authority figures, anything that teaches them to honour and respect their elders should be viewed in a desirable fashion and an important step forward.
Consider it this way. The use of formal address used to be a measure of respect in society. How we greeted people and addressed them in public was a sign of their intelligence, ability, position, worth, value, expertise and more. The same could also be said with respect to how we engaged with our peers and elders in casual conversations. How we responded to questions in different settings. How we conducted ourselves in everything from classrooms to work environments. How we looked at individuals and groups and regarded them as superior, inferior or on an equal basis.
That’s not the case today. Far from it, in fact.
Raising and lowering the bar when it comes to perceptions about societal standards isn’t difficult for most people to accomplish. Recognizing what they’ve done, what they’ve accomplished and how they deserve to be treated in society is far more difficult to achieve or simply come to terms with.
Those are some of the reasons why the Quebec government’s reintroduction of formal address in French language schools is a good decision. Could it end up being unsuccessful? Yes, of course. It could also lead to a measurable increase in politeness and respect for people, authority and standards in that province – and other provinces to follow. That’s an important experiment worth trying.
Michael Taube, a longtime newspaper columnist and political commentator, was a speechwriter for former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper.
