Marc-André Éthier

Translating the Ideal of Deliberative Democracy into Democratic Education: Pure Utopia?

Is the idea that the self‐determination of all citizens influences progress towards democracy not merely a dream that breaks itself against the hard historical reality of political societies? Is not the same fate reserved for all pedagogical innovations in democratic education that depend on this great dream? It is commonplace to assert this logic to demonstrate the inapplicability of the ideas of both democracy and of democratic education. Though this argument is prominent and recurring in the history of political and educative ideas, in response we can ask ourselves if the gap between the ideal and the reality is effectively insuperable and must be considered an incontestable fact. The double objective of this article is to determine explicitly the meaning and extent of this gap in the context of democracy and of education and to demonstrate that this gap is neither static nor permanent, but is susceptible to being narrowed, from generation to generation.

An analysis of historical agency in Québec history textbooks

In the 1980s, in Québec history textbooks, authors presented history through linear, monocausal designs and attributed most social, political or economic changes favourable to democracy to unstable external causes or to stable external causes. They seldom attributed the evolution of democracy to ‘unstable internal causes’. These textbooks presented citizens as having almost no active role in socio-historical changes. This invited students to analyse past controversial social issues from a fatalistic perspective or through subjective moral criteria, while reinforcing the assumption that people from the past had bad ideas that good people have fortunately refuted since. Québec history programmes were reformed, in the 2000s, for middle and high schools. This article presents the results of a content analysis of the new history textbooks used in Québec, to see whether they still present such a deterministic and relativist perspective of social change. The preliminary results show that they do.

As representações quanto ao lugar dos saberes na educação histórica, manifestadas durante o debate em torno do novo currículo de História no Quebec (2006-2010)

This article analyzes different actors’ discourses during the debate on the new national History curriculum in Quebec, held from 2006 to 2010. Two opposite positions regarding the place of history instruction and its construction were identified: one that aims to develop intellectual skills associated with historical thinking and one that focuses on the transmission and storage of a fixed narrative.