Whoops, the first line of my last post should have read:
“I don’t know. Let’s peg the start of the transition to classical French at the foundation of the Académie française in 1634 by Cardinal Richelieu. I expect that it wasn’t until during the 19th century that most people in France spoke French, with some geezers holding out into the 20th century.”
Of course, with some of those languages (Norman, Picard, Angevin, etc), it’s an open debate among linguists as to which of those are languages separate from French, and which of those are dialects of French. Of course, that’s another example of the contentiousness of linguistic politics and nationalism and all that.
I managed to go through public and high school without taking a Canadian history course, not for lack of trying. Canadian history simply wasn’t offered that often. In the private school that I attended I learned about English history, and was taught a song about the Battle of the Plains of Abraham (a senior class that was studying Canadian history needed a soprano for their presentation, so I was drafted – clueless but drafted). In the public primary and elementary schools I attended history of any sort was not taught. In the public high schools I attended American and world history were taught, but due to some really crappy scheduling I was unable to get a course in Canadian history. (The scheduling was so bad that I had to go to summer school for grade 12 English and could not get grade 13 English at all).
I had to pick up Canadian history by borrowing The Makers of Canada series from my grandfather. Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Texts, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine It had the biases and omissions that one would expect from an early 20th century work, but a lot of it was very well done. Duncan Campbell Scott’s treatise on John Graves Simcoe was remarkable. For more recent history, I just read the essays and texts by and on the major 20th century Canadian politicians (that Trudeau fellow inpressed the socks off of me), so it was difficult sometimes to separate the shit from the shinola.
My sister landed a Canadian history course in high school. After reading her text book, I was no longer concerned about not having had the opportuntity to take a Canadian history course. It was pretty much just pap – extremely brief overviews, dates of battles and the like – combined with a whole pile of crap focused on “what is the Canadian identity” and “is Canada a mosaic or a melting pot,” which seemed to me to be an attempt to come up with a stereotype for ourselves rather than delve down into why what happened happened.
“In arms we march the prairie, most eager for the fray,
whene’r we see the enemy, they always run away.
Pork beans and hard tack, fa-la-la-la-la-la-la.
Poor hungry soldier, fa-la-la-la-la-la-la.”
simply didn’t connect to LaPorte matter. And therein lays much of the problem.
It’s all Dutch to me. 
:eek: I had Canadian history in grades 7, 8, 10, and 13. (Public schools in Toronto.)
Yes, the French language has changed over the years. Acadia was settled by Francophones in the 17th century. (Was their language the purest version spoken by cultured Parisians? The Very Best People from the Capital Cities tended not to pick up stakes & move to the New World; that was left to the marginalized folks, whether they spoke versions of French, Spanish or English.)
Then England conquered Canada & expelled the Acadians. Some managed to stay behind in what became the Maritime Provinces; others were later allowed to return. But many of them moved all the way to Louisiana, where their descendants became the Cajuns. Settling in the countryside, their language continued to change. Children were forbidden to speak French in school & were informed that they didn’t speak “real” French, after all. (Wikipedia has interesting pages on the Acadian & Cajun varieties.)
However, the language that might have given French professors conniptions did prove valuable during WWII.
So, what is “real” French?
Hey, I just dropped in here specifically to talk about French immersion a bit, and I thought this statement was interesting. It wasn’t really the impression I picked up about the French immersion program when I was young, but I could be misinformed. The idea I had was that the French immersion program (in Hamilton, in the 80s,) was run by the public school board, but it was also a program with limited capacity compared to the number of parents who wanted to enrol, so they did have some ability to select students based on perceived merit.
Maybe that’s just what my parents wanted to think. 
My sister was in French immersion all the way through. I was in up to grade 3, and got quite good at French, and was then tested and offered the chance to go into a gifted students program that was NOT being offered in French immersion, and so I left it at that point. I still wanted to learn French, though, and was frustrated that the curriculum started offering very expanded ‘core French lessons’ to the grade that was behind us - they had French lessons during primary school, which I didn’t get in grades 4 and 5, and had twice as much as we did in middle school, (grades 6 through 8.)
In high school, you could choose how many French classes to take as electives, and I did the grade 9 and 10 classes, but I’d really lost any leftover fluency from my immersion by then. 
Anyway, I’ll be seeing my mom and my sister today for turkey, so I may ask them about the French immersion program and how hard it really was to get in. Oh, one other thing if I remember right, was that it was never entirely a ‘French immersion school.’ - Earl Kitchener and the other schools offered French immersion for a lot of classes, but there were also some students who went through without being in the immersion program - and even those that got it took some special classes from english-speaking teachers, things like art, music, gym. I don’t remember the specifics there.
Oh, and to add one other data point - we had no Francophone roots, either - Dad was an English immigrant and Mom is Ontarian anglo with touches of Welsh and Pennsylvania Dutch. (And some United Empire Loyalist, we think.) But she wanted her kids to go through French immersion because she thought it would give us better options in life.
[QUOTE=chrisk]
The idea I had was that the French immersion program (in Hamilton, in the 80s,) was run by the public school board, but it was also a program with limited capacity compared to the number of parents who wanted to enrol, so they did have some ability to select students based on perceived merit.
Maybe that’s just what my parents wanted to think.
[/QUOTE]
Either is possible. Certainly some students in my French immersion class were… how do I put this delicately… dumbasses. Legitimately poor students. And of course it is true that people want to believe their schooling experience is more elite than others. When I went to Queen’s University I met a lot of people who really, truly believed Queen’s had the same academic reputation as Harvard. (It doesn’t.)
However, immersion programs do differ from place to place, so you never know. What makes me doubt that many of them are selective, though, is that school boards just don’t strike me as being competent enough to pull something like that off. I went through 15 years of publicly subsidized education, JK-13, and was never once even tested for IQ or aptitude in a formal manner; they were pretty much just galumphing along, and it was all they could do to just keep track of who was enrolled.
When they proposed destreaming Grade 9, a few years after I graduated, I agreed with the idea 100% not because the idea of streaming is necessarily a bad one but because it was obvious to me, from my experience, that the streaming process in my high school was wrong at least 25% of the time. I knew kids who were dropped back to the intermediate level who were clearly very bright, and kids in my A classes who were as dumb as rocks. I mean, real nitwits, and I’m not being arrogant; I was not the brighest kid in my school and I’ve got the transcripts to prove it, but they were asking kids to excel in classes they had no chance in hell of passing. And once you were in the I stream you were fucked; you couldn’t move up to advanced, because the prerequisite for English 11A was English 10A, so screw you. I knew kid after kid who quite obviously had the brains to go to university but they were put into intermediate classes in Grade 9, I’d assume by dartboard, and that was it; I knew kid after kid who was turned off by school by being put into A classes where they become convinced that school equalled failure and confusion. That’s the level of insight with which school were run. It’s not that the teachers are doing a bad job or anything, my teachers were mostly great, it’s just that school boards don’t have the resources or organization to look at this sort of thing strategically.
To ask that school board to additionally create a screening process to determine which kids could go into an immersion program - oh man, no way. It’d be like asking a llama to do your taxes.
I’m curious as to where and… um… when, if I may be so bold, you went to high school in Canada.
It would not have been possible for you to have gone through school where I did without taking Canadian history again, and again, and again. Indeed, you could not have graduated high school without it. The stuff was pounded into us.
I took Canadian history in 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9, and then an optional in 11, plus of course Canadian geography in 10 whcih has some historical elements.
I was schooled in Halton. Where did you go to school? Did you get a chance to take other history courses other than Canadian history?
[ul]
[li]66-71, gr. K-4, Maple Grove P.S. in Oakville: no history, but social sciences in gr. 4, and 1/2 hour a week French with a kid from another school in gr. 4 [/li][li]71-74, gr. 5-7, Appleby College in Oakville: English history in all years, a strong ancient Roman history aspect in Latin in gr. 6 and 7, and French in all years[/li][li]74-75, gr. 8, E.J. James P.S. in Oakville: no history, but social science, and no French[/li][li]75-77, gr. 9-10, Oakville Trafalgar H.S.: American history in gr. 10 (couldn’t get Canadian history into my schedule), and French in both years[/li][li]77-79, gr. 11-13, M.M. Robinson in Burlington: world history in gr. 11 or 12 (can’t remember which grade – couldn’t get Canadian history into my schedule), and French in 11 and 12 (couldn’t schedule gr. 13 French)[/li][/ul]
Had I stayed at Appleby College, I would have had some Canadian history in high school, French and Latin throughout, and some German and Spanish in high school.
Had I stayed at Oakville Trafalgar H.S., I would have had some Canadian history, French throughout, and some Spanish.
The big mistake was going to M.M. Robinson H.S. They offered a single course in Canadian history, but I could not fit it into my schedule due to conflicts with core courses such as math and English. I was only able to schedule gr. 11 and 12 French, but not gr. 13 French. The scheduling problem was three-fold. First, they did not have many sections of each academic course in the advanced (gr. 13) stream – they were more focused on the general (gr. 12) stream, so the scheduling choices were very limited for kids heading for university. Second, they offered sequential courses out of sequence; for example, gr. 13 English in the fall followed by gr. 12 English in the spring, which is why I had to go to Lord Elgin H.S. (now Robert Bateman H.S.) in the summer for gr. 12 English. Third, although I quite liked my fellow students and the teachers, the very limited extra-curricular sports and clubs, and generally mediocre academics (including a teacher who frequently came to class drunk – a happy drunk, but none the less a blithering idiot once he was in his cups), left me feeling that I was just putting in time, whereas I had had a very good time previously at Oakville Trafalgar H.S. and an exhilarating time at Appleby College (get your daughter in there – it really is that good), so after gr. 11 I decided to cover gr. 12 and 13 in one year. That led to a scheduling mess in which courses such as Canadian history and gr. 13 French could not be scheduled.
That’s pretty much it. You have to understand the history of our family. My extended family on my mother’s side had many people in Montreal starting from the late 1950s, when they immigrated from Europe. They were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who assimilated – just barely – into the English speaking part of the city. And in those days there was a real English-speaking part, meaning you could get by without hearing or seeing any French at all in certain parts of the city.
My parents, on the other hand, immigrated to the United States. To Pennsylvania, in particular, and we built our life there.
But in the early 1970s my uncle, who owned a lumberyard in Montreal, had a stroke. So we moved to Montreal so that my father could take over the management of the company.
It is not that he, or any of us were against learning French. We wanted to learn French. I did learn French, and still speak it OK, even though it’s been many years since I’ve lived in a place where it is in common use. But when we moved there we didn’t think it would become a requirement for daily living. So that aspect changed while we were there.
It all worked out in the end. We all ended up very happy in California. But I was miserable for a while – I loved living in Montreal, and it took me a long time to feel comfortable in Los Angeles.
I was tested in kindergarten. It did not end well.
Thanks to the test, I was bumped up to grade 1, but the teacher told me I was going to hell because my name was not spelled the way she thought it should be spelled (she was going through a divorce, and had very much cracked up). She was fired, but in the meantime, I went back to kindergarten, which made me happy because I had a huge crush on my kindergarten teacher (unrequited love though, for the next year she married some other fellow more her age). Then when I was in grade 3, I was placed with a group of problem students from grade 4. It was a year of mayhem – each one of these kids ended up incarcerated in a reformatory prior to the end of public school, with the exception of one who moved out of town. On the first day of grade 8, I was called down to the principal’s office, where on his desk was my file, open to the kindergarten test. It was a true WTF moment for me that had me worrying just what the hell they were going to do to me this time. It turned out that a one student from grade 8 from that school would be permitted to take one high school course, but I was not eligible due to having just transferred in from another school, despite my grades and kindergarten test. He was very apologetic and consoling at first, and then confused when I broke into a huge smile and enthusiastically said “That’s terrific!”
Fortunately, my kindergarten test did not follow me to high school, but the sons of bitches had me take an aptitude test, resulting in the guidance counsellor strongly insisting that I enroll in the general (grade 12) stream and become a plumber. I declined his advice and skipped the meetings with him for the rest of that year and the following year, for that stream would have severely limited my academic and career opportunities. At my second high school, my guidance counsellor was the drunk fellow who was also my geography and math teacher, so we just sat about and shot the shit about our favourite eskers and drumlins and other cool and groovy stuff, rather than get into the results of the aptitude test or anything else remotely related to adacemic or career issues.
Okay, I did speak with my Mom, my siblings, and my niece, (who’s in grade 8 and in a French Immersion program herself,) today. There was limited availability in the local immersion program when we grew up, but it was not merit-based. There were two elements to the selection:
My brother pointed out that this system might have a noticeable bias towards those of higher educational backgrounds or social class, simply because they might be more likely to think of signing a child up for French immersion classes very early, as opposed to a working class family struggling to make ends meet. And once one kid from the family gets in, the little brothers and sisters get free passes.
Kingston. I did take several other senior history courses in high school, all electives. I went in hard for history, though I neded up abandoning it in university.
JK-SK, John XXII, Kingston, 1975-1977, no memory obviously of what we learned. I note my daughter learned some basic Canadian civics in SK.
1-4. Archboshop O’Sullivan, Kingston, 1977-1981; some mild Canadian civics
5-8, Ecole Cathedrale, Kingston, 1981-1985; history every year
9-13 Regiopolis Notre-Dame, Kingston, 1985-1990. Grade 9 Canadian history, grade 11 Canadian history, grade 12 Canadian-American Comparative History.
Thanks for the tip; I’d better start saving 
That sounds pretty darn good.
I just looked up the tuition fees. We will not be sending the Small One to Appleby College, barring an unexpected lottery win.
I’ll keep my fingers crossed that you win the jackpot.
Consider Oakville Trafalgar – from what friends have told me who have their own kids going through the system now, it is still what it used to be, which back in the day was a step up from the other public high schools in the county. Yes, they take students in Halton from outside of their feeder schools when they have the space.
I’m sure that’s what he’d say, but that’s not a view of history that I’d agree with. In a city where (at the time) the majority of the population speaks a particular language natively*, and it’s therefore the city’s main common language, it’s not hard to imagine that if you don’t speak it, you’ll run into problems. And from suranyi’s account itself, his father was never told that he “wasn’t going to be allowed to use [English] anymore”, he simply realised that not being able to speak French, he’d have a hard time.
*As I understand it, today only 49% of Montreal’s residents are native French speakers, but a greater proportion uses it in their day-to-day life, and an even greater proportion can speak it.
What you’re saying here is that the linguistic unification of France wasn’t complete until the 19th or 20th century. I’d agree with that; some regional languages are still spoken today, but always in addition to French. And unlike in other countries, they’re usually unrecognized by the government. You’d think that today France would decide that supporting its native linguistic minorities wouldn’t be bad policy, but OTOH the concept of a uniform citizenry, with the same laws for everyone, is an important part of how France views itself.
Although that’s not the question I asked; I asked what was the cutoff date between “modern French” and what came before. It’s not an especially important question, but my reasoning was that Capitaine Zombie thought you were saying modern French was developed in Quebec, and if modern French in fact came into existence in the 17th century or later, that might actually be (partly) true. But I doubt it; I expect it to have started during the 16th century at the latest.
I don’t know if you’re saying that Picard and Angevin are closer to Dutch than to French, but they are in fact Romance languages, and very close to French. Flemish, though, was spoken in parts of northern France until last century.
In grade school, I had mostly regional geography/history classes. In high school (that’d be the equivalent of grade 7 to 11 for most of you) I had general geography in first year, general history in second year, Quebec/Canada geography in third year, Quebec/Canada history in fourth year, and 20th century history in fifth year. My fourth and fifth year history teacher was very good, but as for everything else, I’m quite sure that I learned most of what I know about Canadian history outside of school.
I’m not sure I understand. You learned French (and still speak it to some degree), but did your father learn it? If not, then I guess that’s why he decided that wasn’t the place for him. But if he did, then I’m not sure if I understand his motivation. He knew the language but… didn’t expect to use it every day?
You always have the most interesting stories Muffin. (Your falling out of an airplane onto the tarmac is also pretty good.) I’m glad it turned out well for you in the end.
Now that I think of it, I have to correct something:
Actually, under the terms of the Act of Union, both Canada West (formerly Upper Canada, soon-to-be Ontario) and Canada East (formerly Lower Canada, soon-to-be Quebec) had an equal number of seats in the Legislative Assembly of Canada. But in 1840 Canada East’s population was greater, which is why we can say that the English speakers were overrepresented. In the following 20 years the situation reversed due to immigration, and Canada West now had a greater population. This (and the strange “double-majority” procedure under which the assembly functioned, which made the passing of legislation extremely difficult) was the impetus for the development of a new, federal constitutional system.
Thanks, that’ much better put.
I Think Muffin’s just playing off the old phrase “It’s all Greek to me” using Dutch instead cause that seems to be a minor meme on this board. Also Dutch is a funnier word.