The French Primary School and Literature for the Young: Benefits, Difficulties, and Promises of a Relationship at its Beginnings

Abstract

The time has passed in our primary schools when reading horizons were limited to deciphering a manual of judiciously chosen texts with marginal commentaries by pupils on the travail, the vexations, and the jokes accumulated over generations on this school exercise; the time has passed when the pupil who had done his work well (or worked more rapidly than the others) was rewarded with permission to take out a book from the little class library and read it in his own corner. The conditions of school reading have undergone considerable transformation in France over the past fifteen years or more, and there is no doubt that the development of literature for the young has played an important part in this transformation. A link has now been established between children's books and the school as an institution and, generally speaking, between the child and books within the school. This has certainly not been without its problems for both sides, but it represents an evolution in which there seems to be no chance of turning back and which is far from having revealed all its potential. I would like in this report simply to pinpoint the relations which have been established in the French primary school between the pedagogical process in all its dimensions (and not solely from the standpoint of learning to read) and books for children, to examine what the school has gained from this intrusion and also the problems which the use of literature for the young has posed and continues to pose within the school as an institution, and finally to delineate the abundant promises residing in this cooperation.