Contenu du sommaire : Mélanges offerts à Bruno Poucet

Putting into perspective the last five years of the Carrefours de l'éducation journal and its evolution highlights its characteristics. The place given co-authorship and its different configurations (with the presence of research doctors and doctoral students) gives a clear account of the constraints weighing on research during this period and on the conditions regarding recruitment in higher education, particularly in France. The authors' institutional homes as well as the objects studied and the methods used are put in perspective with two national reports regarding research in education and training. In fine, Carrefours de l'éducation seems to be sticking to its editorial brief: the journal, while publishing papers within the fields which constitute the educational sciences, devotes space to the emergence of research topics, themes and methodologies which are of interest to education and training.

This analysis, led by the Carrefours de l'éducation's editor-in-chief, aims at getting a clear picture of the evolution of the proportion of papers going on to publication. Its corpus is that of all the articles received between 2014 and 2019 as responses to call for papers and as varia, a total of 258 papers. Who are the experts solicited? What is the proportion of papers that do not go on to publication among those received? In which category, varia or call for papers, is the proportion higher? Why? The paper thus presents in a transparent manner the inner works of an academic journal.

Bruno Poucet's professional career and academic work are intimately linked to Picardy, where he was born and raised. At the origins of a renewal of the history of education, he is also one of the instigators of a territorial approach (Amiens, the Somme département and more generally the Picardy region). The latter is the fruit both of his itinerary as a teacher and of an evolution in his research after having defended his HDR (Habilitation à diriger des recherches or Diploma enabling the directing of research), from the national to the local. This paper will examine this aspect of his contribution to research and its epistemological contribution. Three perspectives have been identified and contextualised. Poucet's “taste for archives” led him to discover or invent local unpublished sources and to produce invaluable research guides or instruments. This practice accompanied the development of the history of higher education and of the Amiens académie or school district.

Georges Lefèvre (1862-1929) is, with a few other figures such as Charles Chabot in Lyon, one of the pioneers of the grounding of university disciplines and research in what at the time was called the educational sciences. When a member of the faculty of literature at the university of Lille, he was for a while the poster boy for these methods. As the confident holder of a scholarship from the young Third Republic, succeeding at the academic contests for the teaching of philosophy (agrégation) (1887) and then writing a doctorate (1895), he taught for fourteen years at the Laon lycée (high school), then at the university of Douai first in philosophy (1896), then in the professorship created for him in the educational sciences (1899-1913) before becoming full professor of philosophy. In 1898 he established a Pedagogical Institute and attracted to its faculty a large number of teachers and academic inspectors (in particular for primary education). He was elected Dean of the faculty in 1903 and kept that position until his death in 1929. This paper will not concentrate on the details a Third Republic academic career but focus on the four field studies Lefèvre directed between 1899 and 1910 in the schools, middle schools and high schools of the Lille school district in order to assess their goals, results and limits, while highlighting this concern for the “field” as an innovation in the area of education research.

Higher elementary education, created in 1833, gone unmentioned in 1850, is revitalised as of 1881. If the goals of this education are clearly set out for boys, not so for girls. Thence, how did the first directors and teachers in these schools manage their institution? This paper aims at bringing to light their preoccupations regarding education and instruction, as well as the ambitions they nurture for their pupils. On the basis of a corpus of unpublished archives we will show the role played by these pioneers in the education of young girls form modest backgrounds as well as in the history of female education at the turn of the 20th century.

Laicity has been both a major issue in France's history of politics and education and a crucial aspect of Bruno Poncet's research. From his work on the FEP-CFDT (a private school union) to his involvement with the transnational workgroup “Laïc education”, the issue of the relationship between the religious sphere, the state, and the schools has nourished a great deal of his work. What is his work's relation to the research and to the trends in research on laicity in the schools? What characterises his work on this topic, and what trends dominate it?

The paper focuses on whether the papers published by Bruno Poucet regarding this topic after having defended his HDR (Habilitation à diriger des recherches or Diploma enabling the directing of research) are in keeping with his way of regarding the history of educational policies as it transpires through the two main perspectives he has chosen to explore (the history of teaching philosophy and the history of private schooling) as well as with his HDR memorandum.

This paper, whose methodology is socio-historical, looks at the role international organisations and some African countries have assigned to private schools since the 1990s. The paper is divided into two parts. The first examines the discourses of different international organisations and explores the explosion of private initiatives in Africa after international recommendations relayed by a variety of lenders amongst them the World Bank. The second examines how the authorities in Senegal and in Rwanda regulate private schools. The two countries present differently: in Senegal, Muslim institutions are proliferating and resisting all attempts at association or contract with state authorities, while in Rwanda private institutions are under state surveillance.

This interview with Antoine Prost highlights the commonalities between the two historians of education Bruno Poucet and Antoine Prost. While abstaining from encomium, the latter testifies to common interests and issues: making the archives speak, putting unionism into perspective, going back on the importance of the history of education, all these issues are formulated on the basis of the Antoine Prost archive deposited with the National archives (550 AP).