Contenu du sommaire : La réforme en éducation au XXe siècle en France

The scenario for an education reform seems well established: the Minister conveys a Commission, which leads an Enquiry, writes a Report, and hands it in to the Minister. The latter presents, a while later, which measures s/he will keep. A public debate then opens, whose issue is difficult to predict. This paper focuses on the origins of this scenario through a study of the reforms or tentative reforms of the 20th century. When did it get set up? Why has it been efficient at certain periods and not at others? What have its components and variants been? The paper thus highlights the diversity of commissions and shows how their efficacy has been a function of their composition, mode of functioning, relationship to political power and to the top civil service of the Ministry, but also of the institutional and historical context, which leads to the perception of different periods in this history. The reception of the report by the unions is of course analysed. We conclude that it seems better to understand reform as a process rather than a collection of punctual measures.

Does the 1902 curriculum program modernise teaching in boys' high schools, as the Republicans committed to its implementation argue? It is a fact that, inasmuch as the program reinforces the teaching of the sciences and of modern languages which, on a par with the classics, constitute from then on the basis of an education without Latin, and inasmuch as it revises the contents and the methods used in order to diffuse the “positive” spirit, characteristic of the radical and laic Republic, the program is both innovative and modern in the sense that it tries to adapt the course of studies to the needs of the democracy and nation at the beginning of the 20th century. The result is that the reformers' adversaries accused them of distorting secondary education, some of them making use of the reform's critique to discredit the regime. The battle around renovation lasted no less than ten years but the ministry of Education did not give in and, even if the analysis of inspectors' reports shows that the reform had a limited impact on actual teaching because the evolution of pedagogical practice takes place in the long run, the reform signalled the end of the Napoleonian lycée.

In 1926, the Minister for Public instruction and Fine arts, Edouard Herriot, a Radical, brought in an experiment, the amalgame, consisting in bringing together, in specific classes, students from the classical and modern sections of secondary school and primary school children of the upper divisions.This experiment is characterised by economic justifications linked to the more general project for reforming the schools and instituting one school. At the beginning of the 20th century the issue of founding a democratic school involves reuniting primary and secondary schools, in order to ensure social justice by determining slots in the school system not according to social class but according to individual merit.This paper analyses the conditions in which the amalgam was instituted, analyses resistances to the system, and evaluates it in regards of the evolution of educational policies between the wars.

Much less well known than the so-called Algiers commission and especially than the mythical and sacralised Langevin-Wallon commission (1944-47), the Cathala commission was asked from 1942 to 1943 to reflect upon principles for a radical reform of education in the expectation of the victory and democratic renewal of the French nation. This paper will present the major tenets of the commission's project as elaborated by its members, who also form the object – for the most influent among them – of a prosopography, and highlights the importance of the context of war from Britain. To what degree did pedagogical experiments under these constraints influence the first reform proposals for the aftermath of the war, and is it possible to talk of a “British model”? If it is important not to minimize the contribution of others such as the new education movement or the advances mad before the war with Jean Zay's reform in 1937, nonetheless the work of the Cathala commission is an inauguration to reform strongly influenced by the British context.

Civil servant status having required a recruitment contest, for which neither the Agrégation, which recruits for the High schools (lycées), nor the CAEC (Certificat d'aptitude à l'enseignement dans les collèges or Middle school teaching aptitude recruitment contest), which recruited for the Middle schools since 1941, was deemed adequate, it was decided, in 1950, to institute a new recruitment contest for secondary school teachers, the CAPES. But the Agrégation is maintained and stays the reference for recruitment. The lack of pedagogical training of professors recruited through the Agrégation, however, had led the director of secondary school training, Gustave Monod, to give priority in the CAPES to pedagogy: pedagogical tests came before scientific ones, themselves based on secondary school programs. All candidates having to have a BA, this was supposed to have verified their scientific level. The main secondary school teachers' organisations vigorously protested against these choices. In 1952 Charles Brunold, succeeding Gustave Monod, reversed the priority of pedagogical tests to scientific ones at the CAPES recruitment contests. Were it not for the institution of the CPR was born (Centres pédagogiques régionaux or Regional pedagogical centres), which institutionalise the idea of a pedagogical training for teachers recruited through the CAPES, the latter would simply be a “minor aggregation”.

In France, from 1896 to 1968, the rector of each Académie or geographic division, nominated by the minister for Education, presides over the board of the University in his/her academy and plays an important role in the development of university structures. If his/her role is to apply decisions taken in Paris, s/he also defends local projects in Paris. The rector insures the physical reform of the faculties through new buildings and then, usually after 1960, through the transfer of university activities to suburban campuses. His mission is also to supervise the application of locally or nationally decided pedagogical reforms and to enlarge the offer of training. Confronted with the multiple tensions arising after 1955 from the massification of university attendance, the rector often has to deal with student discontent, just as his/her presence as president of the University is being contested. The events of May 1968 were to break with this heritage from the Third Republic.

The paper focuses on a corpus of articles published in the general press in France between 1959 and 2008, in order to analyse the recurrence of the debates arising at each new reform project since the sixties. It shows the way a repetitive polemic manages to capture the public's attention by opposing apparently symmetrical camps, those of the “republicans” and of the “pedagogues”, which impose the perception of schools through categories sustained by identification with agents rather than philosophical conviction. An analysis of the evolution of the way the press has presented these educational issues over the past 50 years shows that the polemic, systematically initiated by anti-pedagogical reactions, is an ideal response for the media to make use of. The refusal of reform, which characterises it, turns out to sustain the need for revalorisation of an identity under pressure, that of a social group comprising teachers, journalists and intellectuals, whose reference points are put in question by school reform.

In the context of the reforms in the sixties, special education saw a considerable development of its structures, an expansion of its personnel and of the populations under its remit. This reorganisation, linked to the lengthening of compulsory schooling, succeeded thanks to the mobilisation of actors in the relevant institutions, unions, and civil organisation, activists in the cause of children but also in the cause of a laic public State school for all. Their converging interests were relayed by the plans worked out at the central level of the administration. However little by little the modalities for intervention have changed, in keeping with the findings of the Bloch-Lainé report (1967) but also in keeping with the criticism of the abusive vocational guidance given young people failing in school and finding themselves labelled “borderline retarded”. From then on, the watchword will be the struggle against all forms of lack of adaptation in teaching. The underlying logic, that of prevention and adaptation, will open onto policies of overall integration.

Launched in 2007 order to improve vocational training's efficacy and bring it closer to the working world, the renovation of vocational studies actually consists in a new structure for the diplomas and trainings on offer. As well as generalising the preparation of a vocational baccalaureate in three years, it transforms the BEP into an intermediary diploma and launches anew the CAP in all vocational high schools. Despite the official arguments, which make much economic and professional needs and requirements, the analysis of its genesis and first results indicate that its objectives are actually budgetary and school-based, work and jobs having only a very secondary importance. The reform is actually part of a politics of subordinating vocational training to the school system, which contributes to the lack of clarity of the meaning of diplomas both within the school system and on the jobs market.

This paper tries to better define and follow the variants of a notion, which has constituted both a referent and a symbol over the past twenty years, and which has been the object of vigorous disagreement and varied interpretations or implementations. Even if the expression “socle commun” only made its appearance with Luc Ferry in 1994, the idea actually goes back to Giscard d'Estaing's presidency. This historical study has the ambition of explaining what was at stake in the debates as well as the intellectual and political challenges it represents in order to give a unified compulsory schooling from primary school through middle school its meaning and foundation.

How have social sciences analysed the relationship between leftist organisations in general and educational reform (understood as the desire to transform the educational system)? This paper focuses on the bibliography on this topic. There have been few such studies, given that the proximity between leftism and educational reform tends to be taken as a given. The corpus consists in research produced in France since the 70s, analyses research from history, educational science, political science and sociology, and highlights the way this scientific literature is, in part, linked to the political and educational context. Three main trends emerge. The first is that of programs and projects for education, as produced by leftist organisations. The second takes its source in teaching unions. The third looks at educational policies conceived on the left and at the tensions they give rise to.

The “New Education” or “Modern School Movement” pedagogues were interested by the role of artistic education in alternative schools. Élise Freinet created an original conception of artistic education known as art enfantin - children's art. Her experience of free drawing and free painting constitutes a whole, which was integrated with what Freinet called the child's free expression. She also gave her attention to the diffusion of this educational method by creating the journal Art Enfantin. This historical study, based on the archives of three journals, L'Imprimerie à l'École, L'Éducateur Prolétarien and Art Enfantin, enables us to identify the main stages and the evolution of this experiment in pedagogy. It also enables us to identify Élise Freinet's specific contribution to the new pedagogies and especially to the Freinet pedagogy.

Partnerships between different agents of the educational institutions are developing anew with the reform of school rhythms, and are a symptom of the adoption of a paradigm of “enlightened eclecticism” by the French educational system. The observation of a visit to a museum, extracted from an ethnographic study with a strong sociological bent of the Parisian schools shows that the divergent practices and organisations of the different actors lead them towards forms of cooperation under considerable constraints. They seem to privilege the conditions of their partnership and the preservation of a fragile balance within the school over modes of appropriation of the cultural experiences in question. This means that certain pupils, most often those from lower class backgrounds, find it difficult to articulate the classroom with their different cultural experiences and to benefit form their synthesis.