Homeschooling The families sued Quebec

With the help of attorney Ann-France Goldwater, nearly 2,000 homeschooling families will try to strike the court next week.

Tristan Peloquin
Pres

The lawsuit is being funded by member families of the Association québécoise pour l’éducation à domicile (AQED), which claims to represent a total of 4,000 of the roughly 10,000 home-schooled children. Requiring these children to undergo ministerial tests is an “undemocratic assault on the educational freedom of parents,” he asserts, which “empties home education of all interest of its meaning.”

In the interview PresM^e Goldwater, who heads the movement, argued that they receive a better quality education “on average” than those who attend public schools.

The government could better defend its exams, and it’s an open secret that the quality of education in the public system leaves something to be desired, otherwise we wouldn’t have the horrifying statistics showing that 54% of Quebec adults are illiterate. Something is wrong with the system.

Attorney Anne-France Goldwater

In Quebec, the Education Act General Allows exemption from school attendance for children receiving “appropriate education” at home. However, regulatory reforms introduced by the Legault government now force all children to be home-schooled, at a level equal to 4.^e and 6^e years, as well as 2^e4^e and 5^e Secondary school has to take Ministry compulsory year-end examinations. The results of the first panel, which was supposed to take these exams last June, are yet to be made public by the government.

Unjust punishments and “irreparable harm”

According to the lawsuit, these mandatory exams specifically punish 4-year-olds^e and 5^e Significant anxiety and stress due to the fact that by imposing on them the secondary “ministerial exam marks will be [100 % de leur] The final grade, although it is only 50% of the overall grade of the students in the school.

AQED also pleads that “more than 50% of homeschooled children have learning disabilities or physical or mental health problems that cannot be adequately addressed by the public education system.” If they fail the compulsory exams, these children could theoretically be forced to return to school. This would expose them to “irreparable harm” because these “schools are not provided with the resources to support their education,” the suit says.

M^e Goldwater, who attended public school in Outremont as a child, says his early education was “a disaster”. “I learned to read at 3 years old, do you think I’m going to draw like a baby in a crib in kindergarten and first year? she asks.

The fiery advocate recognizes that some parents lack the ability to teach their children a strong enough lesson at home. But for these cases, he says, the portfolios, which are already required twice a year by the Ministry of Education to testify to the child’s progress, are sufficient to intercept cases of educational deficiencies.

M^e During the pandemic, Goldwater says her own granddaughters were educated by two teachers at her law firm — “one English and one French” — who were hired for a full year following the school’s closure. “When a parent does the same at home, the child doesn’t have to spend the whole day at school. You know, the purpose of public school is to allow parents to go to work,” says the lawyer.

Her granddaughters, she says, now attend a public school in Westmount. “I worry that they are not private because they don’t just see rich people very often, they know the real world,” says M.^e golden water