”School is boring”. This crude statement is what you often hear in the halls of multiple secondary schools around Québec.

What is the root of this disaffection? ”School is stuck in the past.” and ”It begins too early in the morning” are what students of the secondary school La Camaradière Samuel Castonguay and Philippe Champoux said. Another student, Jérome Ratté stated that ”The classes are too long, there’s nothing to do at lunch time, some teachers are really boring and can’t manage to make their classes interesting.”

According to Anne Lessard, a teacher in the departement of studies in scholar adaptation and social relationships, students do not realize the importance of school. This seems to be a major cause of dropouts.

Despite the fact that there are less than before, dropouts are still very much of a problem. There still is about 13% of the boy and 8% of the girls who quit school before they finished their secondary five. This is concerning because those people will have much lower chances of finding a job they really want to do.

How can we change this? Some solutions came up. Jean-Claude Kalubi, a writer for the website Érudit, proposed two solutions. The first being to create organisations in schools dedicated to making the school appealing for their students and the second being to find the students with the higher chance of dropping-out and giving them specialized support. A student, William Turcot said that ”the first solution seems to be the best because, even though it’s not that big of a change, it’s still something that might work.”

An English teacher, Jean-Sébastien Gagnon, shared some of what he considers to be good solutions. ”I think that asking a teenager to sit down for five hours a day is too much”. As an exemple, in Les Pionniers school, a 4th grade spends a part of their morning outside, exercising. They run, walk, do Yoga or simply do exercises. They call it the ”Yo Period” and they feel very privileged about it. According to him, this would be a good thing to implement in every school since that would allow students to concentrate better during classes afterward. He went on to describing another solution that is discussed by many people working in the field of Education. He explained how he thinks that, like in British-Columbia, weaker students should be accepted in private schools as well as performant ones. Private schools are funded in great part by the gouvernement (70%). According to him, that would create a drastic improvement in the constitution of groupes all across the province. Everyone has to help weaker students to improve.

Even with all these solutions, can anything really be done to improve the life of our youth? Only time will tell… Until then, the best thing we can do is stay in school and keep studying.