CEGEP! C...whaaat?

CEGEP!  CEGEP stands for Collège d'enseignement général et professionnel.  There’s where my 18 year-old son was in school this past year, while his 18 year-old cousins in the States were in their senior year of high school.  This isn’t another post about how Canada is different from the States but how Quebec is different from the rest of North America, or to be more Quebec-centric, how French-speaking North America differs from the rest of English-speaking North America (my apologies to any other far-flung francophone outposts in North America).

My son graduated from high school after his 11^th grade year. To be honest, I had a hard time getting my head around it. What happens to the 12^th grade? Where does it go? And why? I remembered who I was after my 11^th grade year (as in NOT ready for college), and recalled what a great time my senior year was, especially the last half when it was all downhill towards graduation. Quebec was going to deprive my son of this well-earned Rite of Passage. 

My perspective, however, has changed. All hail CEGEP! The truth is that high school, sadly, can be an awfully boring place. Young adults are treated as children, their weekday lives dictated by a set of bells, with rules in place to constrain their childish outbursts (which, I hypothesize, are generated by the very fact of being treated as children). Suddenly, CEGEP entered my son’s life and treated him as an adult. He had a class schedule like any college student, 3 hours one day, 2 the next, etc. No study period. No weekend detentions for bad behavior. And voila! A bright kid, bored to tears by high school, began doing phenomenally well…and sustained it throughout the year. He has one more year in his CEGEP before going on to 3 years at a University.

To be clear, I’m not saying that my son’s 12^th year of education was better than his cousins, but it surely was different. And it worked for my son, and apparently for a lot of young people.  I’ve informally been polling adults who went through the CEGEP experience and they are universally positive in their praise of the system.  The irony in all this is that the idea for the CEGEP came from the States.  When CEGEPs were first created in the 60’s, they were modelled after the Junior Colleges in the States. Quebec stole the idea, and improved it. Way to go, Quebec!