Francis Chartrand for Rivière-des-Mille-Îles

There is a simplistic mythology of Quebec history: Before it was bad and sad, and now it's finally happy. All statistics on the increase in suicides among youth, unemployment, a slow decline (and the requirement to have two earners in a family), the largest use of drugs, the ever-important d ' abortions, the increasing number of broken families will not change anything.

It is an article of faith and we must propagate the myth (fabula is propaganda).

We had already seen the treatment that was a caricature book LIDEC (with legal errors, and papal history in some cases).

Editions of La Pensée (made famous by a radio host for their bias in favor of Ms. Françoise David) is needed to contribute to the spread of the simplistic myth.

The booklet manual 1st RCT secondary looks so on the societal changes that followed the advent of the Quiet Revolution.

In the left column of scenes of life of 50 years, in the right column of the corresponding scenes of the 2000s.

What is happening now there immediately?

The family portrait is monochrome (yes, of course the pictures were often, but life was it?), everyone is serious in 1950. Today, everything is color and smiles.

In the schoolyard, the nun who oversees sports a grin authoritarian. The children have been experiencing a shortage of cultural topics and a Franco-French cultural somewhat open to the world, while today the prevailing cultural wealth that finally opens in a globalized world (and not standardization and Americanization of course).

Finally, the class of the 50s Unisex (how horrible!) is dominated by a nun who seems to mumble a strong voice lesson while students are passive on their bench. Nothing to do with classes today where young chemists (down with classic culture!) work and discover their own small groups and experience modern science under the approving eyes of a charming host of class smiling and benevolent. A malevolent spirit will notice that in the modern classroom are valued roles held by women: the moderator, the two girls who handle tube.

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On the myth of the Great Darkness, read

The example of Quebec's past to the twenty-first century;
The myth of the Great Darkness and Quebec underdeveloped;
The classical colleges;
Statism and the decline of Quebec;
The Quiet Revolution: break or turning point?

Excerpts:

On the eve of the Quiet Revolution, Quebec is not an underdeveloped society. Half of Francophones are employed ... in the service sector? In 1931, the census shows that few people still lived on agriculture and that 2 / 3 of the workforce employed in the secondary sector (manufacturing) or tertiary (services). The manufacturing industry had always grown here at the same pace as in Ontario, and has been since Confederation. Throughout the twentieth century, the proportion of Quebec workers working in the industrial sector is comparable to the proportions observed in the United States and several European countries.

There does not further delay of urbanization in the province. Migration to cities is steadily since the late nineteenth century. Quebec has an even higher rate than urban Ontario from 1900 until the 2nd World War and would remain above the Canadian average thereafter (for a threshold of urbanization of 10 000 inhabitants ).

[...]

This suggests that Quebec francophones have never had the mentality of "born to a roll, and for good reason. In 1953, Quebec had the second per capita income highest in the world after the United States (excluding the rest of Canada). Did we really need the Quiet Revolution and state intervention to lift Quebecers that alleged "Great Darkness"? Absolutely not! Quebecers were developed and upgraded by themselves, and long, without state support.

[...]

Jean-Luc Migué Statism and decline in Quebec: Review of the Quiet Revolution overturns the conventional view and argues that the Quiet Revolution, far from the boom period that has allowed Quebec to have access to modernity and to catch up its delay, has instead resulted in degeneration economic, political and social response to dramatic growth of the state. It is from this moment that the gap between the standard of living of Quebecers and Ontarians began to increase, the decline of Montreal has accelerated for the benefit of Toronto, that linguistic conflict and political worse, that sectors such as health and education have suffered the onslaught of ever more intrusive bureaucracy. Quebec is of course a dynamic company with an enviable standard of living, but our integration into the capitalist economy in North America that brings these benefits. All sectors controlled by the state are themselves perpetually in crisis.

To not slow the loading of this page by too many color images, we stored five pages of this activity (SAE) here.

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Save the boys!, Jean-Louis Auduc, part but not against the law-thread Go Girls! (Seuil, 1992) and What's New in girls? (Nathan, 2007), sociologists Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet.

If social inequalities in access to education are now questioned and give rise to the establishment of public policies, there is another divide largely ignored. Yet again, the numbers are overwhelming: boys and girls are not equal in class. Of the 150 000 young people leaving without any qualifications in the education system in which the media often tell us, we do not say that over 100 000 are boys. From elementary school, boys show a delay in the acquisition of reading and writing and clog structures for students in difficulty or perpetrators of violent behavior. The sexual divide is often more significant than the social divide in the analysis of school careers. The traditional studies, developed in terms of economic inequality and cultural, must evolve to a place in this disturbing reality. School failure has a sex. Claiming to solve this societal problem without taking into account one of its main features is illusory.

A bad score that continues from primary to tertiary, as seven out of ten women have a tank or a diploma postbac, against six out of ten men. According to 2008-2009 figures from the Ministry of Education, girls are 31% to get one as good or very good bac S (which do not attract the scientists, but strong), against 24% of boys.

Why such a difference and such a failure? "The girls, or poorly recognized in the house, have over-invested in the school and they are recognized, the author explains, deputy director of the IUFM Paris-XII Val de Marne at Creteil. Conversely, boys are often found in their family but they live in an identity crisis at school. (...) The belief of their superiority confronts the boys to insoluble contradictions do not result in a superior intellectual girls in their class."

We note immediately that the obvious physical precocity of girls do not seem to have touched the author as a possible explanation for the difference in results between boys and girls, nor the fact that the school promotes attitudes traditionally "female": listening and obedience.

Results for author: The boys are taken to devalue the academic knowledge and to rebel against the school. The spiral of failure is initiated. She checks into the direction where the girls are under-represented in the so-called short courses (CAP, BEP, Bac STI, bac pro, etc..) However, they are overrepresented in higher education, except networks of excellence, where boys fro before them.

Indeed, despite the best educational pathways, girls less often than they choose the channels of the elite. This situation is linked to a "cultural atavism" that prevents "shake the boundaries of male and female within the family" by the author. Recall that, according to other authors, it is simply a strategy to choose careers that allow maternity and employment (by avoiding areas where knowledge quickly becomes obsolete). According to a study (March 2009) of the National Fund for Family Allowances, two thirds of parenting and household work based on women.

The author's family - one that students and the one reproduced - there she is, the great fault ... "The professional discrimination no longer find their roots in the institutional inequalities, whether at school or in the laws, but in private homes and consciences," writes the author. Discrimination based on traditional images of both sexes who have strong repercussions on the education of each other. It does not, however, how the struggle for adequate fight against these stereotypes would solve the problems of boys!

The author argues that the fact of less verbally and physically stimulate the boys (which wants stronger) has a direct influence on language acquisition slower in male children. And therefore their education. One wonders which conveys stereotypes here.

Many boys "do not rise forever the stereotype that often embodies the parenting that verbal communication is a skill largely female," says Jean-Louis Auduc. In contrast, the image of women portrayed in some circles "to help girls develop the ability to listen and order which will be an asset to the school." And in society? This is all the more true as we descend the social ladder, and ultimately more damaging to boys from disadvantaged backgrounds. Kings home, they are disallowed in school, where, according to the author, the macho mentality places them in a position of rebels, therefore refusal and failure. In short, if the boys are not doing it because boys are not educated as girls.

How to overcome this situation? For the author, struggling against the macho stereotypes and limiting mixed paradoxically, the author proposes that does not mean campaigning for the return of single-sex classes, but questioned "the appropriateness of some activities where to better manage the entire class, boys and girls are separated.

Worst case for Le Monde but not unrealistic: it is also conceivable that the gender gap will decrease with the continued rise of girls. By dint of closer social positions of the boys, they also adopt the codes and develop turn perverse aspects still own stereotypes of sex "safe". But would it be a victory for them?

This is the portrait of the painful adjustment to male school that this essay focuses. These include social and cultural reasons that predispose boys to fail and girls to succeed in order to propose concrete solutions to this problem collectively.

Source : Le Monde and the publisher

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MANAGUA, Nicaragua -- With just 300 or so Muslims in all of Nicaragua, it became an instant mystery here when a big new mosque suddenly seemed to spring up recently in a residential neighborhood.

Like, who paid for it?

The ever-present Managua rumor mill quickly turned to the government of Iran. Its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a Muslim, and Nicaragua's leftist leader, Daniel Ortega, a Catholic, say they share a revolutionary kinship. As part of a grandiose effort to show that Iran is a global superpower, Mr. Ahmadinejad and his government promised in 2007 and 2008 to invest up to $1 billion in this impoverished country of 5.7 million, including a new city and deep-water port in a remote jungle on the Atlantic Coast.

Never mind that local Nicaraguan officials say they haven't heard a word on the port project ever since an Iranian-led delegation was confronted 18 months ago by angry villagers. Or that virtually none of the other announced investments have materialized.

The geopolitical chatter surrounding the gold-domed mosque, which opened in September after more than a year of construction, continues. "Did Iran put up the money? That's the question everyone asks," says Ismat Khatib, a native Nicaraguan lawyer and businessman who is of Palestinian descent. One Managua-based diplomat says it is believed Iran subsidized it.

But Mr. Khatib, who is treasurer of the Nicaraguan Islamic Cultural Association, which oversees the mosque, insists that the Iranian government contributed not a single córdoba. In fact, he says the only thing it actually promised to donate was a large, special rug for the mosque's prayer room -- and that it never arrived.

"This is the real version," says Mr. Khatib. "You can end the mystery with this."

Not quite. Speculation also surrounds who has been praying at the mosque, or la mezquita, which offers services five times a day, beginning at 4:30 a.m.

"All the Taliban," declares William Martinez, a 24-year-old barber at Le Moustache, a hair salon across the street. Natalie Melendez, a clerk at the Veo Veo video-rental store on the corner, offers a different account. "There are two types of people who use the mosque," she says, matter-of-factly. "The Arabs and the Iranians."

Muslims, particularly Palestinians, have been emigrating to Nicaragua for decades and have established a number of businesses here, especially in the fabric trade. But because their numbers are so small, their faith remains foreign to most Nicaraguans, who are largely Catholic or evangelical Christian. Many here refer to all Muslims or Middle Easterners as Turks, and seem to know next to nothing about their religious beliefs.

"They pray to the god of the moon so they only gather at night," says Ms. Melendez.

In an interview, Fahmi M. Hassan, a Palestinian fabric merchant and president of the Islamic cultural association, sought to dispel some of the myths surrounding the new mosque, which he says cost about $600,000.

Mr. Hassan -- who says Nicaragua's Muslims mostly are transplanted Palestinians, Jordanians and Pakistanis -- scoffs at rumors that Iran paid for the mosque. He says the Iranian Embassy in Managua angered the Muslim community here when it tried about a year ago to compete with his Islamic association by creating a similar entity with a nearly identical name -- the Nicaraguan Islamic Cultural Center.

"No one went," he says, noting that Nicaragua's Muslims are of the Sunni branch of the Islamic faith while most Iranians are of the smaller Shiite branch. Conflicts between the two main Islamic sects date back to the religion's earliest days and a dispute over who should succeed the prophet Muhammad as Muslim leader.

Mr. Hassan says the Iranian center closed after a few months. But he still counts Iran's ambassador to Nicaragua, Akbar Esmaeil Pour, as a friend. In fact, he says, the diplomat occasionally came to Managua's old mosque -- located in a small house a few blocks away from a busy strip of fabric stores -- to pray. Mr. Pour declined to be interviewed.

So who did pay for the mosque?

Mr. Hassan says the primary funder was a Pakistani-born businessman who lives in Honduras.

After seeing how tiny the old mosque was, the man offered to help finance a new prayer center on a piece of land purchased several years ago by local Muslims, Mr. Hassan says. "He paid around $350,000 and the rest was paid by the [Muslim] community in Nicaragua."

He identified the donor as Yusuf Amdani. Asked for Mr. Amdani's contact details, Mr. Hassan suggested using Google to find him.

Reached by telephone in Honduras, Mr. Amdani, who is chief executive of Grupo Karim's, a textile-and-construction company based in Honduras and Mexico, said, "There's no mystery about the mosque."

He confirmed Mr. Hassan's account, saying his company, which also financed the only mosque in Honduras, agreed to pay for the new Managua prayer center, although he scaled back the original plans. He also says he didn't pay for an adjoining annex that includes a school and an apartment for the imam, and suggested the Iranian government may have helped fund that.

"I wouldn't doubt if they gave some money to help them out," he says. "I would say they must have."

Mr. Khatib says his family paid for the annex.

On a recent visit to the mosque, a Wall Street Journal reporter was stopped by security guards at the front gate and, without explanation, was denied access to an afternoon ceremony. Just then, two local Nicaraguan businessmen drove up in a car and attempted to enter.

They publish a Managua tourist map and were hoping to discuss with Mr. Hassan including the new mosque in next year's edition. Unfolding the map, Julio Gonzales noted that the current one has a cathedral, but no mosque and said that many tourists have been asking where the new one is.

"He's very busy," said a man inside the front gate. "He'll have to call you back." Turning to leave, Mr. Gonzales took another look at the mosque. "Good building," he said in English.

Maybe so, but it turns out that this one shares something in common with many construction projects the world over -- a dispute with the contractor.

José Ocon, who built the mosque for Mr. Amdani, says he's owed $15,000 because of some last-minute changes to the dome he made at the local Muslim community's request -- increasing its height and adding a row of windows.

He says he called Mr. Hassan and said, "I need to get together to discuss the extras that you all requested."

The builder says Mr. Hassan replied, "What extras?"

Mr. Hassan says he doesn't know anything about the contractor's claim. Mr. Khatib says it's Mr. Amdani's problem since he agreed to pay for the mosque. Mr. Amdani says he'll look into the matter.

Meanwhile, Mr. Ocon recalled that at one point during construction, a local newspaper called him and asked if he was building a new Iranian Embassy. "I said, 'No, I was making a mosque.'"

Write to Steve Stecklow at steve.stecklow@wsj.com

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