Office Of The Commissioner Of Official Languages: Commissioner Of Official Languages

Rue Saint Jacques Dept: An essay question asks students to write about demographic changes that occurred in the 20th century in terms of immigration, migration within Quebec, and natural growth. In a telling omission, the consequences of Bill 101, which reduced Quebec's population and is recorded as the largest internal migration in Canadian history, are not to be considered by the students, according to Montreal Gazette. There has been virtually no fuss about the avoidable problems of bad English in the over 20 years of these exams. The Quebec-Canada entente has paid several hundred million dollars to Quebec for minority-language education. When will the Education Ministry actually start using proper English? When will the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages actually start criticizing the Quebec government for its indifference to English-language education and in his book Who Killed Canadian History?, one of the country's foremost historians, Jack Granatstein, says: "Nationalism in Quebec is not propagated in a haphazard way by individual teachers. It starts at the ministry level and it permeates the textbooks." We can now add official history examinations to that. For over 20 years, Quebec has been producing dubious nationalist history in its compulsory examinations. The most recent exam for History and Citizenship Education which replaced the old History of Quebec and Canada avoids issues that are politically uncomfortable for nationalists and is an excellent example of bad history. While this is supposed to be an examination in English, some of the documents are in French and historical English names have been changed to comply with Bill 101. L'Estrie in 1880 was in reality the Eastern Townships; and Rue Saint-Jacques, Canada's financial centre in 1920, was in reality St. James Street. In addition, the examination uses words that are not English. One question asks students to identify forms of cultural expression associated with currents of thought such as "agriculturalism" and "cooperatism." Neither the Google, Oxford, nor Webster dictionaries recognize these as words. Nonetheless, students have been taught them because they appear on the official curriculum and in the textbooks. These are only a translator's notion of English. This tells us something about the intellectual levels of those writing the text and exam. As Montreal writer Bill Weintraub used to say, it is difficult to write satire in Quebec because real life is so funny you can't be any funnier. As reported in the news.
@t minority language education, english language education