Contenu du sommaire : Redistribution, reconnaissance… justice ?

Political egalitarian thinking has been focused on the ‘public' sphere, namely the political relations of the state, the economic relations of the market, and the cultural relations governing social recognition. This issue addresses other inequalities in education. While unequal economic relations give rise to differential access to resources, they also impact on levels of respect and recognition, the exercise of power and the distribution of love, care and solidarity relations. The authors coming from different cultural environments –Australia, the USA and Great-Britain for English-speaking countries and Belgium, France and Switzerland for French-speaking countries– emphasise the relations between redistribution, recognition and participation to account for inequalities in education. English-speaking contributors also focus on the correlations between justice in education and care.The issue suggests that Fraser's three-dimensional conception of justice should be supplemented by care relationships and solidarity which deeply, albeit invisibly, impact on educational attainment.

The paper explores the various conceptions of equality in contemporary schooling –formal equality, equity, recognition– that find their expression in teacher approaches and practices. It points to the limits and dilemmas that each conception entails for teachers. Formal equality relating to the French political model of the late 19th century grants equal rights to all students irrespective of social belonging, which makes academic inequality even worse for lower-performing students whose individual difficulties are not recognised. The equity-based teacher-student relationship is tailored to suit particular needs but students might be treated on an individual basis to the detriment of the social nature of behaviours. In the recognition approach, students are identified through collective features and the effects of discrimination are compensated but tensions with individual merit are rising and positive decision-making is often perverted into compassion.

Lingard's paper is based on a major study (QSRLS) of classroom teaching in Queensland which involved 250 teachers and 1,000 lesson observations in primary and secondary schools over a three-year period across a range of subjects. It was designed to explore how productive pedagogies (namely practices of intellectual demand, connectedness, supportiveness and working with and valuing difference) were enacted in Australia. The findings of Lingard and his colleagues demonstrate that ordinary teaching practices based on “pedagogies of indifference” often lack intellectual demand especially in working class areas and there was an apparent trade-off between the intellectual demand of classes and the care dimension of teaching. The QSRLS study also found that schools do not give students who lack adequate cultural capital the kind of skills they need to achieve. Drawing on Fraser's thesis that recognition is not possible without redistribution for those who are marginalised, Lingard calls for ‘a politics of redistribution of productive pedagogies for students living in poverty'. The paper also raises political questions: will those who are the net beneficiaries of education allow or enable sufficient resources to be invested, in what are essentially their potential social competitors, to enable them to compete on equal terms for valued educational credentials? If all students did attain equally high grades across all groups, how would selection for a stratified labour market operate? Would social capital not replace cultural capital as the mechanism of labour market selection in a highly competitive situation? The unfair distribution of the various capitals and of recognition permeates the porous walls of the school institution.

The paper presents the ethnographic study of an innovation of the French school administration designed to fight against unequal access of 5th grade students (3ème) to courses in upper secondary vocational schools. The author explores how the various forms of institutional recognition of users and the management and economic challenges of the educational system have ambivalent effects on the capacity of educational actors to translate the issues of social justice into the daily life of the institution. In this way, he shows how the assignment of students in vocational courses is driven by plural, possibly conflicting institutional practices with paradoxical consequences for users.

The paper focuses on the outcome of legislation in Scotland, the Education (Additional Support for Learning) Act that was designed to give educational supports to children with learning difficulties including those due to social disadvantage. The ‘overt aim of the legislation was redistributive' but the authors found that the legislation did not operate as it was intended. While children with additional support needs (ASN) are much more likely to live in socially deprived areas, they are also more likely to be identified as having behavioural troubles rather than having dyslexia, Asperger's Syndrome, or Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder. The kind of massive redistribution of economic resources that would make a difference to seriously deprived areas simply does not happen. Thus the statutory entitlement to ASN was acquired disproportionately by parents in socially advantaged areas.The authors underscore that piecemeal reforms fail to address structural injustices which, in turn, perpetuate inequalities. Riddell's paper also highlights the gendered and classed order of informal family care work in education and how the phenomenon of informal family caring (nurturing and love labour) is not named or examined in most studies as an educational resource although it is vital for educational success.

The author analyses how religious conservatives have appropriated the language of recognition and redistribution to make social justice claims on the US State. What the paper shows is that when religion is granted equal status with other identities, the claim to religious recognition has parity of status with claims relating to disability, gender, race and/or sexuality. While the home schooling movement may look like a private choice, it redefines mothers as domestic workers who generally manage home-school relations and contributes to reconstituting the public sphere via the private. It represents an attempted inversion of the political order through the reappropriation of caring-as-education. Religious populists reconstitute ideals of progressiveness and equality for non-egalitarian ends. The attack on the secular state emerges as an attack on public education, which is fittingly congruent with the capitalist agenda of reducing the ‘nanny state', leaving education itself open to the market (Harvey 2005). Feminist ideals are reinvented by home schooling as religious conservatives have appropriated mothering-for-education as productive education work. School materials –curricula, self-help and management guides, etc.– are mostly done by women for a new market in education readily supplied by internet businesses and religious publishers. Feminism may need to “reconnect feminist critique to the critique of capitalism” (Fraser 2009) if it is not to find its discourses reappropriated for unintended purposes.

The author studies the school paths of immigrant students from the perspective of social justice and recognition through interviews with schooled teenagers in Belgium's French-speaking community. The integrated approach –distribution, recognition, power– allows to concretely understand the interconnection of these dimensions within school environments in which youths develop themselves as moral subjects and take action. Two major sources of inequality emerge: social and spatial segregation impacts on the school attended by students and traps them into socially deprived environments unfavourable to school competition. The socioethnic stigma is experienced in their relations with their peers and teachers. Three ideal-types claiming equal participation emerge –open school path; confined school path, and unstable school path– and induce contrasted paths and identities.In the face of individual strategies, social inequalities remain in school environments. The victims of inequality seek to accommodate to the negative effects of stigmatisation. When they access quality schools, they need the resources and support of family and friends to gradually remove the stigma of their ethnic and cultural background.

The author shows the major role played by think tanks in the direction of educational reforms in the USA. Since Ronald Reagan came to power, the progressive consensus dating back to the 1960s has been gradually challenged by conservative think tanks. They paved the way for new cultural hegemony based on free trade principles applied to public education and the growing accountability of individuals. While they appropriated progressive arguments towards support to underprivileged students, conservative think tanks managed to ruin support to affirmative action programmes and promote a strictly discipline-based pedagogy.

A school of journalism has developed an apprenticeship course delivering the same degree as its classic course in order to diversify access to the trade and contribute to the democratisation of higher education. The study of the author covers the design of this course, analyses selection tests and describes the work of “confirmation” (Boltanski 2009) made by management and apprentices to clear doubts about this new course. The school promotes a civic standard of social equity but selection is at odds with the ambiguous notion of diversity and with tensions between merit and diversification. Faced with the concentration of visible minorities, apprentices wonder about the weight of ethnicity in their recruitment. Apprenticeship becomes legitimate once competences and qualities gained in practice are appraised as though firms were the sole actors in a position to promote socially equitable meritocracy.

In Poland, the state monopoly in defining curricular contents was abolished in 1989. However, the liberty given to textbook and curricula contributors is now partially challenged by many educationalists. It raises a problem related to secularism as this liberty allows the intrusion of personal, especially religious beliefs in what is officially comprehensive education. What is sought in this paper is to explain the conditions behind the emergence of the 1991 Education Act and to show that it was adopted by members of parliament on the basis of converging critiques of the marketisation of public education and of the former school system.

This paper addresses the recent changes in the environment of confessionalism in Quebecan schools from the perspective of the place devoted to religion in education. After relating the legal and political steps towards the new secular conception of relations between religions and education, the author explores how social debates were summarised into pedagogical arguments making religion one facet of citizenship education. Drawing upon an analysis of the religious education competence of the ethics and religious culture (ECR) curriculum, the author throws light on gaps between original intentions and their translation into course contents in which two conceptions of democracy and basic rights coexist.