Doesn’t school take up too much space in today’s society? The question is striking, as the education system is going through a deep crisis and struggling to fulfill its promises of equality. However, this question is at the heart of Influence of the school (Presses de Sciences Po), a book written by sociologists François Dubet and Marie Duru-Bellat and published this fall.
With this documented and subtitled essay When too much school kills educationThe two researchers, renowned for their analyses of educational policies, are now changing their perspective. François Dubet and Marie Duru-Bellat are going into the field to study the growing importance of school in life trajectories and social balances since the beginning of mass schooling in the 1950s. A school from which no one today asks anything less. “determining the value of individuals”according to them.
To start with some statistics: over the past five decades, the high school graduation rate has quadrupled. The number of students has nearly doubled since 2000, to the point that“Being a student has become the normal way to live your youth”the authors point out.
If they do not deny the contributions of this democratization, even if they question the real increase in the level of knowledge and skills, François Dubet and Marie Duru-Bellat wonder if we have not arrived “at the end of a cycle”. Are the continued expansion of studies and the primacy of academic knowledge still desirable? No, the two sociologists respond. Because the “Today, more and more schools are turning against school, against students and against many dimensions of social life”.
How do they arrive at this observation? In fifty years, professional hierarchies have been largely inspired by educational hierarchies, they explain. Academic success has become “a social obligation, even a moral duty”. In a word: an imperative. And this need weighs on parents, because “When everything is at stake at school, every sacrifice is necessary”. Thus, in wealthy families competing in educational games, language trips and other homework help, “The way of education is similar to sports training”attacks both authors.
“Endless race”
But the more the number of graduates in the population increases, the tougher the competition and the more complex become the strategies of the most advantaged and best informed to obtain the most socially and economically profitable degree. “Allowing studies to continue over time gives the less advantaged the impression that we are becoming more democratic, while the more advantaged are left with the possibility of going even further and maintaining their advantage”sociologists point out.
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