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"Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer" (Colton Charles Caleb,1820, Lacon, Volume I, page 354). |
Each June, thousands of Quebec adolescents assemble throughout the Province in order to pass a right of passage. While upwards of thirty percent are going through this process for a second time, the remainder are experiencing the thrill of the uniform examination "History 414" exam for the first time. Question number 6 on the June 2000 exam asked:
"To encourage colonists to settle in New France, the authorities introduced a program of land division and distribution called the seigneurial system. Under the system, various persons had specific roles.
WHICH TEXT BELOW DESCRIBES THE ROLE OF THE SEIGNEUR?
a) I am a senior official. The king has placed me in charge of the internal administration of the colony, which means I am responsible for land management.
b) I have been settled on my land for several years. In exchange, I had to agree to pay the cens and to provide several days of work (corvée) on the seigneury.
c) When the colonial authorities wish to communicate with the population, they ask me to transmit the royal orders. I am also responsible for training the militia.
d) As an entrepreneur, my main role is to recruit colonists and provide them with facilities, such as a mill for grinding their grain."
In its 1998 province-wide survey of anglophone schools, the History Task Force noted a number of salient secondary classroom realities. Taken in their totality, these separate nuggets reveal a teaching history cohort that is generally ill-prepared, dispersed in its subject workload, and dependent on dated student texts. In particular, the survey results showed, for example, that:
Diverse Pasts: A History of Québec and Canada, by Dickinson and Young, was originally published in 1986 by Copp Clark Pitman out of Toronto. Following a somewhat traditional structure, the text chronologically marches in its 370+ pages from the First Peoples, to European exploration and experience, to establishment, growth and fall of New France, through various Canadian groupings and forms of responsible government, and finally terminates with "modern" Quebec somewhere in the early part of the 1980's.
While there is a 1995 revision of Diverse Pasts that brings the story up to a more contemporary level, the overwhelming majority of secondary schools still use the older, original edition. What scarce text book money is available within the anglophone school network is being more prudently spent in the mathematics and science areas.
A 1987 soft cover Teacher's Manual - specifically and pointedly orientated to the time restraints and content of the mandatory History of Québec and Canada course of study - is available. This Manual is a 150 page compilation of teaching suggestions, map and fill-in exercises, reproducible masters, discussion activities, and other related evaluation materials referenced directly to the official program of studies.
Although the 1986 edition of Diverse Pasts is clearly dated in content (the volume itself is over fifteen years old and reflects a historiography that may well be over twenty years old) and pedagogy (relies on black and white photos, small maps, and questionable reading levels), this volume nonetheless remains the preeminent academic text used by adolescent anglophone students to acquire the necessary knowledge to successfully complete the History uniform examinations required for secondary school completion. Due to ongoing budgetary restrictions as well as some system-wide confusion concerning possible curriculum revisions, new funding for History texts and related support material is not a priority at this time.
Unfortunately, the teaching of History in anglophone secondary schools is in a somewhat sorry state. Notwithstanding an official curriculum that makes History mandatory for high school graduation, the lack of a sufficiently trained teacher pool coupled with an appalling absence of adequate teaching resources makes the task of instilling into young anglophones the importance and immediacy of History problematic. As if these two major impediments were not sufficient cause for concern, the added elements of a pending major program revision along with a state of historical revisionism muddies these academic waters even more.
A careful review of a number of appropriate high school texts clearly indicates that seigneurs, as a general class of individuals, were largely portrayed as absentee landowners who had a marginal role in the development of New France. With a societal function often equated to that of landed gentry who occupied a privileged position within a structured hierarchy imported into the new world from the old, seigneurs have not been historically portrayed as business men, economic adventures or entrepreneurs. More specifically, Diverse Pasts, as but one concrete example, succinctly notes that the Company of One Hundred Associates "granted tracts of land called seigneuries with the provision that the landowners (called seigneurs) were to recruit colonists, but few did. The impact of seigneurs on settlement was minimal" (page 67).
Nonetheless, being taught by teachers who may lack their own adequate historical knowledge and using textual material that is dated and may be suspect, it is no small wonder that many anglophone adolescents would have had difficulty knowing that response "d" was the correct modern interpretation to question number six on the June 2000 Uniform Examination.
References
Dickinson, John A. and Brian Young. (1986). Diverse Pasts: A History of Québec and Canada. Toronto: Copp Clarke Pitman.
History Task Force. (1998). Overview of the Teaching of Elementary Social Studies and Secondary History Within the Anglophone Community of the Province of Quebec. Quebec: Ministère de l'Éducation.