Contenu du sommaire : La sociologie de l'éducation à l'épreuve des changements sociaux

This article aims to separate globalisation from the analyses which equate this process with a critique of capitalism. Its focus shows that it also corresponds to the construction of ethical principles – the development of a universal human condition or a global conscience – which goes beyond the interplay of national stakes. The demonstration is based on an analysis of the worldwide competition for the training of populations and the workforce. Training is booming all around the world but is expanding faster in countries which have fallen behind and more slowly in OECD countries. Human development is set within a competitive context – the combination of tax and training factors has all governments face two constraints. Indeed they should both develop the skills of the workforce and reduce the tax burden on companies and people.

The educational and training systems south of the Sahara have reached a dead end as they can no longer assume correctly their educational and training obligations. They are not only uncompetitive on the labour market but also create unemployment. The advent of globalisation with its effects on job mobility, the standardization of diplomas, regionalization and increased economic competition challenges them to react and has them turn to and apply international standards. Although internal or externally-imposed remedies are provided for, they remain inefficient. Therefore the solutions to this dead end lie neither in the inadequate provision of degree courses nor in various attempts at educational innovations. Overall solutions could imply a rereading of the objectives and purposes of these educational and training systems. Admittedly they are a totally different social fact which should however open up to the rest of the world.

The author notices that the model of western modernity, including school, in which the pattern of a territorial national State predominates has been turned into international standards meant to integrate southern countries to the stakes of globalisation. The fact that a single and ideal model of an effective school system is widened worldwide enables him to demonstrate that similar modes of government and management are applied in all countries at the State and school levels. In that respect, Hutmacher's and Nyamba's texts echo the author's thoughts. The sociology of education should therefore analyse its mechanisms and solutions when African sociologists should take up the moral and critical challenge of a modernisation proper to their countries. Overall, we cannot fail to set up the construction of a field of knowledge and of a critical theory.

This contribution goes back over the study of a series of transformations which have been made on the borders of the school and work fields – the development of sandwich courses, the reintroduction of apprenticeship in business as a legitimate mode of training but also the status of vocational schools and the official establishment of continuous training. Some theoretical approaches which have influenced the sociology of education have also, in some respects, been damaging to knowledge. Some phenomena are now regarded as new only because they had been excluded from the public debate. This article takes an opposite approach and goes back over the construction processes of training in France by the agents of continuous training and shows that this field was behind experiments and reflections which were then codified and extended to initial training if not to all school levels including university.

The relations between education and the world of work are being transformed. This change has coincided with the rise of a new mode of labour organisation and the search for greater flexibility at work to adjust to technological changes and to increased competition because of economic globalisation. What new analyses can the sociology of education offer to better understand these relations? Do they give rise to a reconstruction of its research field? After a brief account of the pioneering works of the sociology and economics of education, the author gives an overview of the main research lines of the sociology of education on the relations between the education and production systems. He then singles out one of the key ideas centred on how these relations develop and from it offers new research lines which imply a broadening of its field of study.

This contribution is based on the analysis of two texts which transform training into a link category between education and work. It suggests examining different sets of action in the matter of training, above all vocational training, from three coordination patterns – ideas and knowledge are increasingly resorted to and are thus the subject of controversy; levels and territories are overhauled following devolution processes of varying degrees from one country to another; finally, negotiation and contract work allow to develop diversified and increasingly complex configurations of agents. Implementing coherent public policies is difficult and does not necessarily take place at the national level.

The French republican model clearly separated the Republic or state schools from churches or communities. If secularism accompanied the distance between religion and man, the separation has never been complete but has rather resulted from compromises between civil and liberal demands. Republican policies have separated the common secular space from societal spaces and from private spaces. In a multicultural society, this map of a public space is questioned by individual and community demands. The great confrontation between the political and universal metaphysics was replaced by a confrontation between a community-based recomposition of liberalism and the liberal reconstruction of republicanism. In the face of policies to recognize the minorities' rights and differences, a renewed form of republicanism opposes the secularism to the political translations of cultural pluralism.

Sociologists have for some time become aware of the overemphasis on school to the detriment of diffuse education in general. It has given rise to a diversification of research subjects. This article is set within the framework of a widened sociological viewpoint on education. It takes for granted that education proceeds through insertion into relations and that each relation includes a triple dimension of installation, learning and socialisation. This contribution is intended to react against the growing split of sociology into different subfields through the example of teenage cultural practices. Their study falls within different fields: sociology of arts and culture, sociology of work, sociology of knowledge, sociology of education, etc. Too much focus on a specific subfield results in irrelevant analyses as the “truth” of practices partly lies outside the subfield in question. In turn, the trouble with this isolation is that the way teenagers try to be distinguished from their peers is overemphasised. Thus a purely artificial portrait of teenagers is drawn. If sociology is not to fall into an “identity substantialisation”, it should try to think out together a transitional situation common to all social groups save for the differences in school and family backgrounds and gender.

Ethnography in the field of education still faces a recognition gap towards educational and university institutions compared with much-appraised statistical surveys. Howard Becker pointed out this situation about twenty years ago. According to the great figures of interactionist sociology, notably Becker or Goffman, the low institutional recognition of ethnography should be regarded as a sign of its independence from official speeches. However, a close examination of concrete field situations shows that a strict application of the ethnographic approach can lead to largely limit the social space accessible to observation. Conversely, a more pragmatic approach taking field constraints into account could help improve surveys and in fine the heuristic interest of ethnography. The question of accessibility of the different social worlds that a position of moral denunciation or expertise allows to overlook is yet to be answered. Thus it would be advisable to think openly of new theoretical and practical tools for ethnography.

The article questions the current epistemological status of ethnography. Is it an autonomous theory or just an epistemological stage preceding ethnological work? Critical reflexivity, which lies at a crossroads between anthropological traditions (Marc Augé) and the Chicago School (Everett Hughes), on what the observer does in the social world under study leads us to examine the mysteries and dangers of the academic field and the daunting problems of ethnography. The fact that the ethnographer is ?part and parcel' and is sometimes trapped in the social network that he studies implies an investigation of the psychological consequences on the observer. It may also mean, as part of the continuing reflections on the total social fact, a necessary transition from the ethnographic to the subsequent epistemological stage ? the theorisation into social sciences as a break from ethnography (see Erving Goffman for example).

If the objectives of a world statistical programme are mainly political ones, how has their recent evolution taken place? Updating the technical aspects of the output of data on education was deemed necessary in the name of quality. Indeed the reliability or accessibility of data was the object of criticism. In addition, even the assignment of the UNESCO's statistical programme was debated for this very reason –a lack of quality. The data are said to be somewhat irrelevant compared with the users' new needs. Therefore the overhaul of UNESCO's statistics departments proved necessary. However, the study of this reform reveals a complex process which conveys a major shift not only in the political objectives of statistical output but also in how international decisions are made. In other words, while measuring the “basic skills necessary to everyday life” has become common, how that measurement was justified remains disputable.

This article is intended to shed light on the origin and the development of indicators applied in educational policies. These indicators have allowed the establishment of structured scientific and technical networks and the invention of new forms of management of the educational system. A shift in indicators from inequality to equity or to quality has contributed to the definition of new modes of codification and standardisation of education. Therefore analysing school indicators amounts to looking into the shifts in indicators and the rhetoric which have accompanied their application and diffusion within educational systems. Crossing sociology and history has enabled us to highlight how school indicators were set up and how these different epistemological spaces have followed one another since the early 20th century.

Critical competence only makes sense in the long term. Indeed prophets already used the values of the world-to-be to denounce the existing world. The author makes the distinction between two traditions: the academic one and based on Christian neoplatonism and leads to the theory of illusio –the social world is mere appearances and morals as intelligence push us to go beyond. The other one is based on a series of ethnomethods which enable little men to adapt and mock the failings of the mighty and sometimes use these very failings to overcome power relations. The following conclusion can be drawn from this archaeology: if the critical approach of the 60s and 70s is but one aspect of a tradition, the current crisis concerns only this form. In turn, new approaches could develop in other circumstances.

Among the challenges that critical sociology now faces, there is the need for greater solidarity between very different and socially distant agents. For that matter we can no longer content ourselves with denouncing injustices, pointing to inequalities or acknowledging the agents' critical skills. Building bridges between different agents with similar experiences should also be taken into account as soon as knowledge is produced.

In educational circles, it is assumed that industrialised countries believe girls achieve clearly better academic results than boys. Although it is true in many cases, this belief stems from a homogenization of all developing countries. However, this has not been the case in Latin American countries for several decades. This article examines some aspects of that issue in Brazil and questions two common explanations for the academic failure of boys: on one side child labour is understood to have them drop out of school; on the other side, from a conservative viewpoint, the policies in favour of girls are said, to have turned schools into hostile places for boys. The author, who denies these two explanations, draws her conclusions on qualitative researches conducted on the academic failure of boys in Brazil.

The devolution of public policies lies in the modes of government of each State. In France, it takes the shape of a gradual transfer of competence to regional councils. This devolution has a number of consequences which remain difficult to identify. As a result, it is within this framework that the national policies of vocational training have gradually been questioned since 1982 on account of the split into local policies. The different levels of decision have restraining and contradictory effects, hence the difficulty for local agents to take concerted action. The development of initial training, apprenticeship or insertion measures for the young varies according to each regional council. Their decisions are made on various criteria such as the social and economic history of the area, the situation of each degree course, the influence of local agents in negotiation and even cronyism. The consequences of devolution are thus hardly measurable because of the growing atomisation of indicators and the difficulty to assess the effectiveness of training. What is at stake is to know whether this transfer of competence allows greater equity in, broader access to and the redistribution of the training offer.