"a disembodied panoptical terminal, runaway organ of a species of mutants"

- Baudrillard

“Tell me how you read and I'll tell you who you are”.

• Heidegger

You don’t read.

You’re no one.

This has nothing to do with the interesting conversations about Canadian bilingualism, it’s just about the profound disrespect for the time of young people (in my experience at Canadian public school). 

I went to school in Canada from pre school through undergrad. 

Everyone had to take French classes. 

They started in grade 4. A French teacher (in France, someone I know, not anyone who taught me French), has told me the best time to learn a language is before age 7. He thinks it’s significantly more difficult to learn a new language after 7 and gets harder every year after. But the logic of starting French classes in grade 4 is that teaching it sooner will confuse the kids or be too hard or somehow be a hindrance to them learning to read and write English. 

Every year, from grade 4 through grade 9 was exactly the same. French classes were 30 minutes 3 times a week which is an overtly absurd way to pretend to teach a language. Every single year we started with the alphabet, and learned the exact same words, the names of classroom objects like pencils and erasers and doors, and items of clothing. There was never any conjugation taught, only vocabulary. As with everything else, there was no grouping of students by interest or aptitude. Students who really wanted to learn French and those who were determined not to were in the same classes and taught the same lessons with the same enthusiasm (none). 

In grade 10 it started over for the 7th year in a row and something was actually learned and continued through high school. The difference was that the teacher actually had to speak French - this was not a requirement for any French class I had taken before; there are people who do not have even an intermediate proficiency in French teaching French to students at the elementary level - and the class was elective, only people who wanted to take a French class enrolled. 

My guess is that I spent 2 hours a week for 40 weeks a year for 6 years in a room where an adult with a very base level of French understanding pretended to teach a language they didn’t know and every adult in the building knew it was all a sham but that’s how the system is. That’s 480 hours. That is an incredible waste of time. 480 hours stolen from each student.

This is essentially applicable to physical education, so called art classes, and any other class where the teacher not only didn’t have a deep understanding of the subject, but where they literally had no idea what they were supposed to be teaching.

Kids know that their time is being wasted. They know the they have no real need for what they’re supposed to be learning, because the teacher doesn’t know it and she makes more money than most of their parents and has immense social capital as a (“overworked and underpaid”) teacher and has complete totalitarian control over them for at least 6 hours a day 5 days a week ten months a year and there’s no way out.

It’s not meant to be covert. The students are meant to know. The teachers know the students know and they know the students know they can’t acknowledge it. It’s an exercise in submission to power. 

You could have spent that time reading.

You could have had a thought.