Designs on the popular: framings of general, universal and common culture in French educational policy

Abstract

This article examines the culture‐shaping strategies pursued through French educational policies. It traces the process through which the republican education system claimed legitimacy to bring all citizens into its universalising embrace and to institute a form of national popular culture. At the same time, the article shows how specifications of esoterically ‘universal’ and ‘general’ curricular content were used to maintain barriers between elite and popular classes. The article then explores endeavours since the 1940s to delineate more democratically framed notions of ‘general’ or ‘common’ culture, and the difficulties that have accompanied the integration of such perspectives into mass secondary schooling since the 1960s. In particular, one sees in France persistent disjunctions between the ‘universal’ cultures carried by academic curricula and contemporary popular cultures and experience (though the balance of power between these poles has shifted in some respects).

Keywords:

• French educational policy
• French cultural policy
• implicit cultural policy
• common culture
• popular culture and education

Notes

1. On the sub‐departments for ‘fine arts’ and the two very ephemeral ministries for ‘art’ that had been assigned responsibility at central level for artistic matters since 1870, see Dubois (1999, pp. 23–108) and Poirrier (2000, pp. 15–29).

2. See Green (1992, pp. 302–303) (in reference to the 1870 Education Act). On English educational ‘voluntaryism’ more generally, see Green (1992, 264–268).

3. Ferry's speech to the Congrès des instituteurs et institutrices de France, 19 April 1881, quoted in Lelièvre (2004, pp. 21–22).

4. On the dilemmas of ‘street‐level bureaucrats’, see Lipsky (1980).

5. For a long historical overview, see Durkheim (1990/1983). The scientific strand came to the fore during the Revolution, but also existed in more routinised form during the nineteenth century, when candidates for the ‘government schools’ of science and engineering (commonly called grandes écoles today) had to take an alternative route to the standard baccalauréat.

6. Mgr. Dupanloup in an 1873 letter, quoted in Prost (1979/1968, p. 66).

7. See, e.g. (but integrating a critical perspective), Durkheim (1990/1983, pp. 363–372, 393–398) (these lectures date from 1904–1905).

8. Goblot (1930/1925, pp. 123–124). On an analogous dynamic at work in nineteenth‐century English deliberations regarding the place of classical humanities in curricula for the upper classes (at the time of the Clarendon Commission in 1861), see Simon (1974, pp. 305–309).

9. For the UK, see Jones (2003). For a comparative account, see (Maurin 2007).

10. Earlier statements of such a view can be found in thinkers such as Condorcet and Durkheim.

11. On the ZEP policy, see, e.g., Peignard and van Zanten (1998). These zones were rebaptised in 2006 as Réseaux ambition réussite and Réseaux réussite scolaire. Opinion is divided on the efficacy of the policies: they have promoted forms of equity over more rigid notions of educational equality, but at the same time they have led to stigmatisation of the schools in question and consequent middle‐class flight.

12. On the links between this counter‐tradition and the work of thinkers like Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall on popular and common culture, see, e.g., Jones (2003, pp. 63, 82).

13. It should also be noted that, within French school culture itself, recent decades have seen a rise to emphatic dominance of a ‘scientific’ culture at the expense of a devalued ‘literary’ culture (to the extent that central government have had to find deliberate ways of revalorising the image of the baccalauréat's literary stream).

14. See Collège de France (1985, pp. 19, 27) and Bourdieu and Gros (2008/1989, pp. 175, 178) (where Bourdieu's ‘modes de pensée’ are translated as ‘ways of thinking’).

15. See Bourdieu (1991, pp. 35–36). For a more extended analysis of Bourdieu's policy work on these occasions, see Ahearne (2010, pp. 138–150).

16. Quoted at Lelièvre (2008, p. 95).

17. PISA stands for the Programme for International Student Assessment. The first survey took place in 2000, and subsequent surveys have been conducted at three‐yearly intervals.