Contenu du sommaire

Alain Mingat : Re-education activities with the GAPP (Psychopedagogic assistance groups) in the primary school. The psycho-pedagogic assistance groups were first introduced in the 1970s with the objective of assisting pupils confronted with temporary difficulties to find a correct reinsertion in school life. The only analysis to have been made as regards these groups is purely discursive. This article shows the wide variety of ways in which this service functions (means allocated by the School Administration, re-education practices, looked at on a global basis, then comparatively from one gapp to another) one of the consequences being that the admission criteria are extremely vague : this incidentally makes it easier to evaluate the effects. These effects are analysed in terms of atteinment and progress during the year containing the re-education period and in deferred terms in later years. The results are on the whole clearly negative, as re-educated pupils tend to make less progress than pupils with initially comparable characteristics but not having participated in the GAPP activities. The effects of having singled out the pupil are often put to cause in this type of situation; here, they are directly brought to the fore empirically to analyse how decisions to repeat a year for given school results are made.

Claude F.-Poliak : Dispensation access to Higher Education. The autodidacts at Saint-Denis. This article which is based on a series of interviews with students at the University of Saint-Denis (France) who do not have their Baccalauréat (equivalent of A-levels), attempts to give an account of the vocations, often occurring later in life, of autodidacts, by describing the path they have followed. The importance of family heritage is clearly underlined, as well as that of a number of initiatory factors : decisive meetings, political, syndical and cultural militancy. After which a study of trajectoires is made for those who, after an early elimination from the education system or relegation to technical education, turned to dispensation procedures in order to register for Higher Education courses. Profane eclecticism and serious- mindedness, downgrading from the top and the work of identity reconstruction characterize these exceptional cases of cultural promotion.

Maurice Guetta : Urbanization and family structures in Algeria (1948-1987). It is commonly admitted that urban households in Algeria tend towards the conjugal family. Based on the existence of a cyclic evolution in the structure of migrant households, this study, which is the result of an analysis of the various censuses and a field study, weakens this thesis. The relation between this cycle and the relative flux of immigrants reveals a discrepancy in the family structures and a tendency for spread families to reconstitute. This process seems to be present in all cases of urban growth resulting from immigration.

Philippe d'Iribarne : Culture and the "societal effect". The Aix-en-Provence School has illustrated a "societal" analysis completely rid of reference to "culture" to explain the differences of salary structure in various countries by calling on interdependences between organizational and educational facts. Without totally rejecting the interest that this type of approach may have, it can be shown that the understanding of data used can be improved and that we can overcome the causes of incoherence within this framework, if a cultural appraoch is not in fact neglected. Thus, accounting for the traditional position of "rank", of a more or less noble opposition, and the refusal to fall fromrank in French society, makes it easier to understand the French situation. In the same way, the traditional constitution of the German society into groups which are juxtaposed rather than hierarchized, explains the present constitution of the German salary structure.