On the benches of the suburbs

Based on a long-term survey of suburban students, sociologist Fabien Truong highlights the diversity of the trajectories of young people from working-class neighborhoods. An exploration of the construction of adult identity and social place that places great importance on languages.

Irfan passed the baccalaureate three times. To obtain it, this commuter from 93 had to make a detour to a private Jewish high school on the other side of the ring road. Then he registered again in 93, in Villetaneuse, in IUT. He is one of the French youth who are chanting Fabien Truong’s book, a formidable corrective to the cacophony of cries and tears that we have heard for so long about the collapse of “ school culture “. With its clarity and tenacity, the work is timely as we measure the ten years that separate us from the deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré by noting that this decade was that of an incapacity, worse: of a denial.

It was also the decade of entry into adult life and the world of work for the respondents whom Truong followed from the 12th grade to the end of their school career. We lose sight of some. Others come back. Irfan is undoubtedly the one who “ surprise » most by its return, and one of the pleasures, one of the strengths, of this book is the place it leaves for the surprises – good and bad – which mark life, and a fortiori the period of great adjustment and transition which is that into which the troubled waters of adolescence flow. For example, this terribly unfair surprise which stops Idriss in his tracks “ prep » with a view to entering the competition forENS : by a coincidence of the calendar, he was born in Algeria while his two older sisters were born in France ; his naturalization file is delayed for multiple, opaque reasons, and when he registers for the competitive exams, he is still not French. Here he is unacceptable even before flooring, and his dream, ardently and patiently prepared, collapses. Truong rightly notes the weight of what Bourdieu called the “ state acts “, which impose themselves with implacable force, and more insidiously, structure “ in depth the perception we have of ourselves » (p. 119). For years, Idriss had played the school against its uncertain administrative status, and in the end, it was the administration which prevailed against the school culture on which he had bet so heavily.

Other surprises come later, sometimes too late. In any case, this is the impression left by the analysis of those who opted against national education, against the legitimacy of the dominant culture, and for “ revenge ” of the business schools private (pp. 193-215). After years spent preparing for entry into higher business schools, at a cost that far exceeds the other trajectories described, a feeling of disappointment colors all the testimonies: “ by doing an audit of all the schools with former prep school students, we realized that it is the same everywhere. They are all mafias. And the course content is really rubbish » (p. 200). Instead of intellectual openness, of critical exercise, where academic investment decides between students, those who sought the side of so-called modernity and the international, found themselves faced with the shimmer of ‘a world driven by ideas but without the content. If there is cruelty at work in the optimism that underpins their drive to succeed – “ probably the trait most shared by all commuter students » (p. 95) – it is especially here, in the lure of business schools which promise a new legitimate base for those who are just entering the higher education market, only to ultimately enlist them in servitude to capitalist profitability. Despite the observation of the exciting aspect of the private route in that it frees the stigmas accumulated in public education, Truong’s verdict on the neoliberal diversification of higher education, which is structurally against the university , seems straightforward (p. 109). But that’s not the most important thing.

Reflexivity in the making

This book offers more than a sharp look at the social field, namely a look which allows us to form a comparative understanding of the trajectories of students, with what they entail in terms of social ascension, financial gain, or confinement in plotted destinies. It actually gives us that, but more fundamentally it invites us to support the progressive awareness among young people themselves of their condition as students, bringing together the completion of their schooling and the refinement of their skills. self-reflexive analysis. In this sense, the journeys narrated here are all exemplary. They carry within them their own analysis, which explains Truong’s choice to organize the volume around the words and exclamations of the respondents. More than hooks, these are the real conceptual milestones of the stories, completed and complemented by the key notions developed by Truong himself – “ tourist » « customs officer “, “ ferryman “, “ rocking horse » – to arrive at as many figures which serve to reveal complex dynamics by naming them, giving them an outline.

Hence the importance given to a certain linguistic plasticity in this text, to what could be designated as a “ talk young “, if it were not to run the risk of denigrating him ; a language that is in any case labile, mobile, marked by repetitions, hesitations, borrowings, and at the same time by an ability to hit the mark, to name what escapes our usual reading grids.

Fanta, cashier at Monoprix:

Frankly, it’s of no use to me BTS. Ten years ago, maybe with a BTS you could aspire to become a manager, but there, the cash register, I could find my way even without the baccalaureate. This is what we need to say to the new generations: don’t rely on high school winners ! I would have liked to have had a linear route… You see a lot of linear routes. ?

FT : No, not much…

Fanta: That’s it ! We (she presses), we make waves, it goes up and down. Maybe I want to touch the moon before I see the stars. I don’t ask for much. Just to continue studying, to be accepted into a professional license. In my BTSthere were around thirty of us. There are only three who continued their studies. One went to business school because her parents were able to pay. And two who completed a professional degree and were lucky enough to find an internship. But that has nothing to do with grades. ! Habiba was the best in BTSshe was 14 all the time. And look now…

Habiba works at Monoprix with Fanta. (pg. 220)

Whether with his expression “ linear path » or with her image of waves, Fanta demonstrates a lucidity which already positions her After his passage through the student condition, in the maturity of retrospective analysis. Hence his remark on what needs to be said to future generations. In this respect, Fanta embodies the cruel optimism that counters any idea that the determination to get by comes down to an individual act (p. 95). That this one would be enough. On the contrary, we clearly see through the recounting of these testimonies which go far beyond the simple interview, even renewed, that optimism or “ goodwill » alone cannot change the situation. And even more, that understanding the vital interest in finding meaning in what we are trying to do – finding linearity in our journey – is not enough in itself to put it into practice, and that therefore the meaning that we are trying to do ‘one gives oneself will always be in advance of one’s situation and in a retrospective projection.

Sébastien makes the same observation when he returns to a concept learned with Truong in final year as he nears the end of his bac+5 in commerce. This is the free rider theory which does not play the game of collective action, a game which will never be profitable when we only think as an individual.

Sébastien (student at a private business school):

But it’s serious, stowaways are a mess at that level. I send an email to the teacher and I put the guy in a copy because I’m not afraid to face these things. I tell the teacher that the group leader is being insolent, that he hasn’t done anything. The teacher never responded. The group leader responds immediately by telling me that I am being a child, that my attitude is not managerial ! While he is the one who has the child, we all pay the same price. He’s a guy who thinks everything is easy when it’s not. ! (pg. 200)

Witnessing Sébastien’s step back from the trajectory he proudly chose gives us access once again not to a judgment, positive or negative in relation to a given purpose, but to the process of adjustment and disadjustment which is continuous. It is this process that makes Fanta both in need of studies and already bitterly beyond it, and that Sébastien knows he is caught in a certain logic of effort while he learns how little it actually weighs.

Cruel optimism

These movements or reversals cause the lifelines to waver, transforming the “ passage » desired out of its initial condition into a composition with the reality of who we are and what we discover. She expresses herself with her own words, which are also the words learned. The most striking example is, to return to my starting point, Irfan. At some point and thanks to a jobhis path forks, turning away from the horizons of a small entrepreneur or trader, towards a position in elementary education: “ ‘Business manager’ is not what I wanted to do, but what I had to do » (p. 180). After a revelation when he is hired as a teaching assistant, he changes. But he still has to fill “ the shortcomings of fools » which he has always carried around (p. 181): “ Initially, I didn’t know what the difference was between ‘ce’ and ‘se’, or between ‘a’ and ‘à’. It’s simple, I had no basis in spelling ! » (p. 181). The reader follows his frantic efforts to get up to speed while holding his breath then, relieved, witnesses his reflections at the end of his first year in office, where we listen to Irfan always reasoning in the terms of his “ origins »:

Well, he’s a guy from the city, his father. He talks like a city guy and the same with his son. Well, as I grew up there, I understood, but I tell myself that if he speaks to another teacher like that or to an old man, how do you expect them to understand each other? (laughs) ? He told me “ My son generally doesn’t happen like that. He’s a killer ? At home, he works with me like crazy ! » Then he said to him: “ you’re not going to do anything here. When you make curd at home, it makes me laugh, but not here ! » He explained to me that he didn’t go far in school and that he doesn’t want his son to do the same thing. He’s around thirty-three years old, he has more work. We see that he is lost. I told him that I understood very well and that I was there for that, but there was one thing that I understood that day, which was that without realizing it, he was learning to make quail. Everything is played out in the way his father looks at that age, children are growing… (pp. 185-6)

But if the words are those “ of the city “, the reasoning is far from it, while expressing the impossible tearing away: “ everything is at stake » but nothing is decided. This is the strength of Truong’s conclusion: there is never any surpassing of oneself, only an adjustment, and with it the slow and painful transformation of the world. It is cruelly optimistic to assert that our resources are necessarily “ of and in this world » (p. 245). But this book allows us to take the measure of their polymorphous potential and to understand the complexity “ multilingual » of these young people made in suburb.