Our Bankrupt Elite

Our Bankrupt Elite

André Michaud

2nd Edition

Published by SRP Books at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 André Michaud

Smashwords Edition, Licence Note

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

SUMMARY

The deep roots of the 2012 Quebec crisis.

Cultural suicide by massive de-alphabetization of the population due to a severe lowering of the general knowledge base of the elite, caused by a decades long out of control degradation of the education system.

****

The failure through ignorance of proper pedagogy by Quebec's pedagogues to address of the critical need for children to be taught to read and write properly before the end of the first year of primary school resulted after 40 years of neglect in 50% of Quebec active population being categorized as functionally illiterate in 2003 by the OECD despite systematic scholarization up to junior high school, with worse figures now taking shape for 2012.

The closing down in the 1960's of all traditional teachers training schools without integrating their high quality training programs into the university based replacement training faculties, combined with forced specialization starting at the beginning of senior high school at the expense of teaching a wide general knowledge base, resulted in all of the current Quebec elite having a general knowledge base not exceeding that of junior high school level of the rest of America, which severely hampers their ability to resolve social issues.

What is happening in Quebec should be a warning to all societies inclined to favor early specialization in their school system at the expense of the acquisition of a wide general knowledge base in secondary school.

Table of contents

Foreword

From Excellence to Mediocrity

Social awareness

The situation before the 1960's education reform

The 1960's education reform

The highway to intellectual and social bankruptcy

Disinformation on the part of the initiators of the 1960's education reform

The reason for closing down the classical course and the specialized teachers schools

The current state of education in quebec

State of University Teaching in 1999

The current situation

Strange directives to our teachers

The difficult teaching profession

A recent alarming sign

Analysis method

What question should be asked?

How to identify the source of the problem?

Severe Problems in our Universities

The Current State of Affairs

An international authority ignorant of past research

University circle insensitive to new ideas

Research hierarchy based on the level of entrenchment

Very costly wrong conclusion

The Causes

Error Noted Ages Ago

Recent Examples

The Consequences

University graduates unable of making the synthesis

The Consequences of Hyper Specialization

The Key to the Enigma

Knowledge base required to understand a problem

Knowledge base required to solve a problem

Objective comprehension

Comprehension of the elite

The Extremes

The Middle Ground

The inheritance of knowledge, left unattended

We educate technicians of knowledge

Scientific literature not very reliable

Only 20% of articles are apparently valid

60% of articles re-propose previously explored concepts

20% of articles are apparently fraudulent!

Growing difficulty in identifying reliable references

Articles difficult to evaluate by the specialists themselves

Fundamental research has become extremely difficult

Situation critical in the educational sciences

Hyperactivity

Dyslexia

The De-structuring of the Quebec society

Degrees awarded without merit!

Our education system, in the last throws of dismemberment

Comparison 1960 - 1998

Student repression in 1998

Inaction regarding the dropout rate

The real cause of discouragement of our children

Ritalin

How can a parent protect his child from the threat of Ritalin

Education is also degrading elsewhere

Our great universities, in the last throws of agony

Code of social behavior

Children growing up in unfavorable family circles

Could our elite's inaction be voluntary?

Strange views in the higher circles of research

Why such a contemptuous attitude?

The problem of hyper-specialization

The problem of insecurity related to under-financing

Economic performance since the Quiet revolution

Compensating self taught education

The recommendation of the High council for education

Unaware elite

Cultural suicide

Condescension or lack of understanding?

Our private schools network

Reintroduction

How to re-sensitize?

Chauchard's problem

How to proceed?

Last attempt at drawing attention of the elite

The impossibility of re-sensitizing the elite

Optimal entry point

The future of our children is in our hands

Why is it important to re-sensitize?

Why attempt to sensitize the population?

Evolution through accumulation of knowledge

The duty that must be associated to any power

Interpretation of Article 30

A Universal Academy of Sciences?

Conclusion

Egocentrism vs altruism

korzybski’s approach

Collective egocentrism/altruism

Too harsh an analysis?

What does the future hold for us?

Appendix A

Attempt at re-sensitizing the university circle

First letter

Letter to presidents and department directors

Second letter

Letter to university professors

Result

Appendix B

The worrying state of education at the university level

Explanation

The Padfield ruling

Conclusion

Appendix C

Power and duty

Text of the Padfield ruling

Reflection on the text

Appendix D

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

REFERENCES

Reference Works

Articles from daily Le Soleil

Article from daily Le Devoir

Articles from daily Midi Libre

Article from daily Le Monde

Articles from weekly Les Affaires

Article from magazine Spectre

Article from magazine Québec Science

Article from Scientific American

Articles from magazine L’Actualité

Articles from Le journal de Québec

Foreword

Many thanks to Ginette Dumais, social worker, for the documentation she provided me with for this research project. Mrs. Dumais was busy for the past 5 years informing teenagers of the inner resources they naturally are endowed with to face potential drug and alcohol problems as well as of the socially available resources at their disposal.

As a member of a mental health prevention program, she wrote a brochure entitled "Me and My Mental Health" that was circulated in high schools for many years.

I also wish to emphasize the outstanding collaboration of René Angel, who from France, provided me with the better part of the information regarding the state of language teaching in his country and most importantly regarding the very effective early childhood language teaching methods of Glenn Doman and Jeanine Cougnenc, both of which are described in a separate book: The Neurolinguistic Foundation of Intelligence.

This analysis was carried out from 1996 to 1999, period during which the Quebec province administration was under the control of former premier Lucien Bouchard. It is in 1996 that this administration forced to retirement the last group of teachers trained in the traditional Specialized teachers schools that were closed down in the 1960's without their excellent pedagogy programs being integrated into those of the "Facultés des sciences de l'éducation" that then started to train teachers as the disastrous Parent education reform began being enforced, thus dealing the final deathblow to the traditional high quality teaching that our people had benefited from during the 330 previous years.

The first paper edition of the present work was sent to press in urgency in an unpolished version at the end of 1999 in an attempt to quickly draw attention to the negative consequences of the deterioration of the elementary and secondary programs in the province of Quebec as a combined result of the Parent reform and this forced hasty retirement.

This first edition did not become readily available for the general public since the distribution networks are a monopoly quite friendly to large editors, but leave no room for small editors not producing at least 4 novels each month.

It was circulated sufficiently however through targeted distribution to expected receptive decision-makers but without success, possibly due to the lack of polish of this first release or to some worry regarding the frustration that I did not hide in any way about the lack of awareness of our elite (whence the title of the book), or maybe because it simply made no sense to them as it was not originating from their circle, or worst of all maybe because these issues were of no interest to them.

Is it conceivable that at least a minority among the close to 200 members of our elite, chosen for their apparent open-mindedness, would not have read, even partially, such an extensively documented analysis, clearly at odds with the general default consensus on the state of our society and education system?

How should be interpreted the fact that none among those who must have read it even tried to bring these issues to the public sphere for debating, if only to demolishing their quite disquieting conclusions if they disagreed?

The reading of this book should allow clearly understanding the reasons for this silence.

The conversion of this now complete analysis to various eBook formats is occurring in 2012, that is 15 years after these last 8000 teachers trained in the former Specialized Teachers schools were retired, which means that the first contingents of students educated from the first year of elementary school after they retired, by teachers themselves educated from the first year of primary school in the education system put in place after the 1960's reform, are now at the doors of our universities.

Interestingly, an endless student strike involving precisely this group has been going on for months now with no end in sight in an atmosphere of growing social unease.

Newspeople and experts of all sorts are lost in conjecture as to the causes of this endless conflict:

Nobody saw it coming and nobody imagined that it would last so long

Author uncertain, comment collected by Le Devoir

Daily Le Devoir, June 18 of 2012

Why does the student conflict endure.

NOTE: For convenience, references to newspaper articles and other sources will be placed in line in the text right after the paragraph referring to it. For convenience also, the titles of articles in French will appear in English to maintain context, but the original titles are still be available in the Reference Section in chronological order.

The text of all articles referred to can be independently verified from the sources mentioned since all newspapers and magazines keep comprehensive archives.

Presently, without being able to predict the exact shape that the first serious social troubles would take, they were quite predictable 15 years ago already and it is just as easily predictable that more severe social troubles yet are just beginning in Quebec. I am afraid that chaos is looming in fact, while our political leaders strut around proudly, insensitive and indifferent to the difficulties of large segments of the population.

Indeed, a decades long accumulation of social inequities unresolved through inability or indifference by our elite, combined with a feeble literacy rate (50% of the Quebec population is now functionally illiterate and the other 50% including the elite, victim of a generalized lowering of its education level due to decades of out of control decadence of the education system) always historically constituted an explosive mix leading to the appearance of radical groups rallying all flavors of dissatisfaction. Once this wheel starts turning, it is very difficult to predict when it will stop.

The same newspeople and experts take righteous offence at some behaviors that, to quote them: do not correspond to Quebec values.

One major question comes to mind regarding this remark:

What Quebec values?

They are no doubt alluding to those values that have not been formally taught in any of our schools for the past 50 years and not at all since the forced retirement of these last 8000 teachers stemming from the Specialized teachers schools. These values are then unknown by the immense majority of the new generations of the population since they never were taught to them.

Consequently, we are not witnessing here a clash between two generations of the same culture, but a clash between two cultures; the first quietly disappearing with the French-Canadian people, who by the way doesn't even remember its name, and a new culture not yet clearly defined now reaching maturity with this new generation and that couldn't care less for the nostalgic remnants of the deceased culture.

We will see also that the successive generations educated in the new system have been deprived of much more than the Quebec values of our offended elite.

Quote from the first edition of this book:

Historically, our elite is not the first to commit such a cultural suicide. The Romans already paved the way as they forbid the teaching of the science of ancient Greece.

The quality of teaching progressively degraded so much that eventually no one was sufficiently well educated to rationally manage public affairs. The Roman Empire then progressively de-structured under the indifferent eye of those who glorified each other as being part of the Empire's elite, while the Empire was in the last throws of collapsing.

Our Bankrupt Elite, 1999,

Chapter Cultural Suicide

From Excellence to Mediocrity

[Back to TOC]

Materialistic orthodoxy is deeply rooted in scientists and philosophers alike and defends its articles of faith with a seldom equaled self-righteousness, even in the ancient days of religious dogmatism.

Sir John C. Eccles, 1993

Our vision of the world cannot reach beyond the extent of the knowledge that we allow ourselves to become aware of.

Social awareness

Definition:

Social awareness: awareness of the problems that ill adapted social structures inflict upon individuals who suffer from them.

The victims of these defective structures are obviously very aware of them, but they quickly learn that any improvement is totally out of their reach. But who then would be in a position to force an improvement of society's structures? Once all has been taken into account, the answer can be given in a few words: the elite of this society.

Now, how could we identify those who make up this elite? Let us attempt a definition:

Elite: Unstructured group of individuals mainly made up of a core of university graduates possessing doctor's or master's degrees in the various domains of intellectual and scientific knowledge, and whose actions or inactions, coordinated or not, determine the structures of that society.

But most members of this elite are generally quite well off, and never had to suffer much from these social structures that sometimes force large segments of the general population to suffer intolerable situations. So having no direct experience these structural deficiencies, social awareness must be developed through other means for them.

It may well be that the only possible avenue would then be acquiring a solid and wide-ranging general education, comparable to that provided at St. John’s College, Annapolis, for example.

In the absence of direct experience, the feeling of personal responsibility that individuals develop with respect to social issues can only be linked to the extent of knowledge that this individual will acquire regarding humanity. Much progress and many important discoveries, that we will elaborate further on, have been made in this regard in the first half of the 20th century, but despite their importance for the progress of humanity, these discoveries seem to have generally escaped the attention of our university elite, due to inappropriate referencing.

This work is a post mortem, a metaphorical Coroner's report so to speak, meant to shed new light on the reasons why a vital element of this knowledge of Man was never widely taken into account in universities circles. It concerns a discovery on how the human intelligence works that should have induced dramatic improvements over time in teaching methods, which would in turn have brought about an increase in the level of social awareness of the elite as a whole, and of the feeling of personal responsibility of its members.

For a long time, specialists have wondered at what would be the long term consequences of the general hyper-specialization trend in all branches of university education that we have been witnessing since the start of the 20th century.

Paradoxically, the first victim of this trend was the only specialty that could have allowed analysis of these consequences, that is, sociology. Although he seldom was regarded as such, the last genuine universally knowledgeable sociologist was, in my opinion, Alfred Korzybski. After him, no university graduate ever had access again to a sufficiently vast pool of knowledge to allow further integrated analysis of universal social trends.

No one analyzes any more in integrated manner the impact of the excessive behaviors of some workers unions, or of the dramatically degraded quality of the education provided in some university faculties, of the quality of teaching methods, the consequences of the indifference of the elite of some societies on the state of their social structures, of the qualification of graduates, teachers, physicians, economists, etc. Discussion of these issues have become taboo.

As progress in fundamental research gradually came to a standstill as a direct result of hyper-specialization, funding began to be allocated almost exclusively, in the forties, to research promising quick results, typically applied research, because it had become critical for the reputation of more and more numerous scientists to have something to publish, whatever the objective value of the contents of the articles. This trend only grew over time, to the point that today where we are witnessing an all out rat race to publish anything at any cost (See Chapter Scientific Literature Not Very Reliable).

"It is pathetic, if not tragic, that society should invest millions of dollars to support such specialists who train future generations in maladjustment, just because they disregard the unavoidable neurolinguistic and neurosemantic effects of their teaching on the lives of their pupils.

Most scientists and educators are either entirely innocent of these problems, or indifferent and passive, or even in denial."

Alfred Korzybski, 1941

Science & Sanity

4th Edition 1958, page xxix

We now have at our disposal the perfect social case study, in the province of Quebec, Canada, a society that, for more than 40 years has been specializing its youth from the beginning of senior high school. It goes without saying that the bulk of the current scientific and intellectual elite of this society is a product of that system, with a formal general culture background not exceeding that of junior high school in the rest of America.

Moreover, the province of Québec is the only place in the world where teaching is forbidden by law for individuals possessing master's or doctor's degrees however qualified they may be in their fields, unless they are willing to sacrifice 4 more years to obtain a teacher's degree in one of Quebec's Faculté des sciences de l'éducation, only 2 of which being dedicated to specializing in any given field. Conversely, any teacher having gotten a degree in education is authorized to teach any subject, from pre-school to the end of high school, whatever field he specialized in. In fact, these teachers seldom teach in their own specialty due to their workers unions