When culture & sports collide

Never try to predict Quebec's stance on any particular case of "reasonable accommodation." Jean Charest's government is like Forrest Gump's famous box of chocolates: You never know what you're going to get.

You may find something sweet and easy to swallow, such as Quebec's crisp dismissal of a veiled Muslim woman's "right" to face cover in a language class; or you may get something bitter and hard to chew, such as recently tabled pedagogical regime changes to accommodate Montreal's Hasidic Jews.

Montreal's Hasidim operate six private schools serving 2,000 students. Quebec funds the secular portion of their pedagogy. Until now, the regime has stipulated 180 school days a year for all schools.

To accommodate the Hasidim's request for more cultural educational time, and at the same time avoid charges of favouritism, Education Minister Michelle Courchesne moved the goalposts for everyone. Beginning July 1, the 180 days will morph into 900 hours. Elementary schools will be tasked with 720 hours per school year (secondary schools 628) spent on the core curriculum of French, English, mathematics and physical education. The new template thus frees up Sunday for an additional school day.

On its face, the change seems "reasonable," since theoretically it doesn't affect anyone else. In reality it does. Certain public schools offer enriched programs: Felix Leclerc seconday school in Pointe Claire, a Montreal suburb, for example, offers a specialty in sports. They do this by compressing the core curriculum into 30% fewer hours than other schools. The new bill's stipulation of fixed hours will annul their ability to offer the seductive sports feature enabling them to compete with private schools.

A more important issue is the ill-considered question of whom this change is accommodating. It certainly isn't the Hasidic children. Structured extra-curricular activities are proscribed on the Sabbath. Sunday is the only day they can take swimming or skating lessons, or participate in organized sports.

For ultra-Orthodox Jews, competitive athletics are at best activities inferior to study, at worst symbols of paganism to be eschewed. The familiar image of the pale, asthenic Talmud scholar is not--or not only -- an anti-Semitic stereotype, but a perduring reality.

Today socially integrated mainstream Jews, including the Orthodox, have a more evolved perception of children's physical needs that aligns with Canadian values. The recent Olympics evoked intense national pride and profound respect for athletic achievement. It's safe to say every athlete in these games played hard and long as a child.

This soi-disant accommodation is therefore not so much an issue of majority versus minority rights, but a collision of literacy values: secular educational literacy, cultural literacy and physical literacy.

There are three stakeholders. Quebec wants economically productive citizens, the Hasidim want a culturally steeped succession and children want ... to be children.

The Hasidim are casting increased textual study in the light of religious obligation, but normative parochial schools cover the essentials of what a culturally literate Jew must know: more is just an arbitrary raising of an infinitely extendable bar. Adding a day for additional Judaic literacy is like adding a Shakespeare-memorizing day to increase English literacy: nice for future English experts, not an essential benefit for young children, and not worth the physical cost.

Our culture's attitude to children and sports has been articulated through Canada's Sport and Physical Activity Act, UNESCO's adoption of the International Charter of Physical Activity and Sport and most recently the 1989 adoption by the UN of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The common theme of all these protocols is that physical activity and skills-building -- i.e. physical literacy -- is more than a luxury, it is a right, and depriving children of these rights has lifelong repercussions on health: not only physical health, but the lost social capital of self-esteem, positive cross-cultural interaction and experience in civic engagement.

The Canadian Sport for Life website warns that "[n]ot being physically literate has consequences for the child, but it also has consequences for schools, recreation programs and organized sport." If certainskills-- balance, co-ordination, agility and controlled speed -- are not mastered between the ages of six to nine for boys and six to eight for girls, they cannot be learned properly in later life.

Don't charge me with anti-Semitism. Jews happen to be the presenting case here, but a sixth school day to facilitate memorizing the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita would be equally problematic in limiting children's sport options. Quebec should not be funding obstacles to children's acquisition of physical literacy.

bkay@videotron.ca