No diploma, no future. True or false?

Normand Maurice, Canada
" Our society considers drop-outs like garbage. No diploma, no future."
Normand Maurice is a tall, imposing man with a powerful voice, fatherly gentleness and profound convictions about the role of education. He lives in Victoriaville, a small city of 80,000 people nestled among the rolling hills and dairy farms of southeastern Quebec, 160 km from Montreal. He recognized twenty years ago as a social science teacher that although schools offered a mixture of academic and vocational programmes, almost one-third of students were failing and about 10 per cent were falling completely by the wayside.

"The excluded are as toxic for democracy as left-over paint or PCB are for the environment," he says. Normand has been waging a battle against those who claim that without diplomas there is no future. Although he does not deny the handicap, he still thinks it is possible to create jobs — tedious maybe — but nevertheless useful for society.


Normand set up training centres in business and waste recycling for drop-outs

In 1987, he and several colleagues launched le Centre de formation en entreprise et récupération (CFER), a training centre in business and waste recycling for secondary school students, most of them dropouts. This ground-breaking approach takes students off the scrap heap of the education system, restores their self-esteem, gives them goals, hope, training, and in most cases, a job.

Maurice admits he didn’t really know who these students were but he quickly began to understand. "Our society considers them like garbage," he says bluntly. "It says: ‘No diploma, no future. The miserable jobs you're capable of doing are jobs we don't want anymore. The future is for specialists. You're a non-entity’. This is a message the students grasp very quickly," he says. "They know exactly what lies ahead. So we tell them the lack of a diploma is a handicap. It reduces your standard of living, but not your humanity. It doesn’t prevent you from making a contribution to society or from becoming a good worker.

"The school system didn't know what to do with them, and didn't much care. A teacher is like a carpenter who gives shape to wood or a welder who gives shape to metal. A teacher helps shape human beings. But the day a carpenter decides to give shape to metal using the same tools and the same methods, he doesn't get very good results."

At the Victoriaville centre, there are forty-eight students, aged 16 to 18, with four teachers. A core curriculum, including math, French and social sciences, accounts for about one-third of the two-year programme. Another third is devoted to personal development and social training with the accent on environment issues.

A final third is geared to job training. Most audaciously, CFER also creates small businesses in the field of recycling and energy conservation, where between 70 and 80 per cent of CFER's former students have found jobs.

Moreover, instead of shipping students out to private companies for half-hearted training, CFER set up its own workshops to do the job.