Lessons under control?

The French school has been repeatedly accused of “politicization”, a term that is as ambivalent as it is often pejorative. These criticisms come from sometimes very distant fields, from the Catholic extreme right accusing at the end of the XIX^e century the republican education system of being irreligious, with some extreme leftists denouncing the school as an instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie. It is an understatement to say that the work edited by Jérémie Dubois and Patricia Legris, resulting from a conference organized on March 19-20, 2015 in Rennes, ventures into a terrain full of passions, that of political influence on educational practices and institutions. The two historians, specialists in school programs and the public policies defining them, are interested in teaching content, whether it is that of teaching programs or school textbooks. These are largely invested, of course, by the social sciences of education under the expression “curriculum” (p. 11). But, concretely, how do powers and political issues influence them?

The authors, in a solid introduction, recall the (abundant) state of scientific production on school programs – the importance of which is specific to the French school model, other systems being more based on textbooks. The book is organized into three axes: the interaction between teaching content and departures from colonial systems, the perception in school textbooks of great figures or periods of the past, and finally the adaptations and mutations of programs and textbooks in changing contemporary societies. The work favors history and civic education, without however depriving itself of incursions into other school disciplines (science, prehistory, modern languages).

Colonization and its aftermath

First of all, what do colonization and, even more, its aftermath, do to school curricula? The book offers a series of contributions around the French imperial space. Edenz Maurice studies teachers and school administration in Guyana after 1946 (pp. 19-32). This territory, gradually departmentalized from the coast, posed the burning question of the adaptation of a school – and its staff – initially intended to be assimilationist and universalist to a deeply segmented society. A situation not without similarities, that of French Polynesia and New Caledonia, is studied from the angle of minority linguistic and cultural teachings by Marie Salaün (pp. 33-44). In a context of fear about the sustainability of local dialects, the school systems put in place to protect them are not without perverse effects. Thus, the recognition as a school practice in 2008 of “Orero”, a Polynesian declamatory art, can paradoxically disadvantage students who are less gifted in local languages ​​(p. 40-42).

However, colonial exit trajectories can also diverge, as in the case of Réunion and Madagascar, whose histories have long been connected. Studying the histories taught in these two territories, Pierre-Eric Fageol and Frédéric Garan (pp. 45-58) show how they ignore each other, with Réunion celebrating its cultural diversity in the French Republic while Madagascar favouring a unifying historical narrative centred on national emancipation. Moreover, as Laurence de Cock shows, the schools of metropolitan France themselves are not without the consequences of colonisation. Analyzing the teaching of colonialism in France since the 1980s, she asserts the link between it and the place of young people in school who are immigrants from former colonies (pp. 59-74). Wasn’t teaching the history of the colonies, she emphasizes, like teaching non-European civilizations sometimes, a way of achieving what the public authorities called “integration”?

The great characters

In the second part, the book focuses on how political issues influence teaching content, through historical figures and periods in textbooks, in both democratic and authoritarian or post-authoritarian situations. Jérémie Dubois thus analyses, in Italian school textbooks from the post-Second World War period (pp. 81-91), the case of Garibaldi, both a unifying figure, literally and figuratively, of Italian national memory, and a stake in political conflicts. Textbooks by authors of the Italian left emphasize his social progressivism in the face of the other (more right-wing) figure of Italian unification, Cavour, while conservative works propose a unanimous reading of the fathers of Risorgimento. Manon Laurent, focusing on Mandarin textbooks in China since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the late 1970s (pp. 93-104). With a particularly interesting quantified analysis (p. 102), she shows a decline in traditional communist narratives (civil war, great figures) and the rise of nationalist, Confucian and ecological themes in the background. Olga Konkka focuses on studying the variations in the perception of Joseph Stalin in textbooks in post-Soviet Russia (pp. 105-120). She shows its winding trajectory, from gradual condemnation in the 1990s to rehabilitation in the 2000s-2010s based on the anti-Nazi victory and accession to superpower status. With humor, Pascal Semonsut (pp. 121-134) studies the representations of prehistory in French history-geography textbooks, both primary and secondary, since the 1940s. From the link between menhirs and the level of religious practice in French society, to that between rural exodus and the place of caves, he sheds light on the way, often unconscious and involuntary, in which their authors project their period onto those of Cro-Magnon and Lucy.

Nationalism in question

In the last part of the book, the question of adaptation to changing nations – and political cultures – arises bluntly for teaching content. Géraldine Bozec (pp. 141-158) shows the evolution of the narrative of French history in primary education. From an openly patriotic project at the end of the XIX^e century, it tends to lose this militant aspect, while remaining largely within a national narrative framework. Patricia Legris (pp. 159-172) highlights the tensions in the developments of history programs in the 1990s-2000s. These arise from the contradictions between a certain pluralization (openness to local cultures and realities, such as those of overseas territories) and a desire to maintain a unified framework despite everything (which, in the case of Corsica, does not go without creating tensions with a local history strongly anchored in students). These developments are not unequivocal: Rachel Hutchins, taking the example of Texas, shows how, under the influence of the new conservative right among others, school textbooks have contributed increasingly since the 1980s to a “memorial pedagogy” that is willingly nationalist and unanimist (pp. 173-183). Catherine Radtka, studying Polish, English and French science textbooks from the post-Second World War period (pp. 185-200) shows divergent developments between these three nations. If, after the war, science, nation and reconstruction were closely linked, France and England saw a clear decline in the national aspect of science textbooks (sometimes in favour of societal issues), whereas it survives more noticeably in Poland. Aurélie de Mestral and Charles Heimberg (pp. 201-212) study the development of school history in French-speaking Switzerland. Marked from 1938 by a policy of “spiritual defence” (rejection of foreign influences seen as harmful), this policy evolved from the 1970s with the increased consideration of scholarly work, sensitive historical questions and the complex balances of Swiss federalism.

This book is very rich and shows three recurrences in its various contributions. Certain disciplines, such as school history, certainly tend to be more sensitive to political passions and pressures, but even the sciences are not spared (p. 214). Similarly, the actors and also the users of the school are not devoid of the capacity for action, or, according to a fashionable expression, ofagency. Finally, in the era of globalization, world history and PISAnational realities remain particularly significant in the teaching content that is closely linked to it.