The history of nursery school shows that educational practices evolve with the conceptions that we have of the child, from the physiological concerns of the XIXe century to “project” pedagogy, through the psychology of the 1970s.
It was at the end of the 1970s that nursery school became an object of study for sociology. The work of Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Jean Prévost, Éric Plaisance and Geneviève Dannepond, laid the foundations of a field of research that has continued to grow and diversify ever since. For Ghislain Leroy, these “founding” authors of the sociology of nursery school all took as their subject “the social representations of the child in nursery school” (p. 15). They show that educational practices change over time because the way we think about children also changes. In this context, one of the tasks of the sociologist is to account for these representations that guide action. In this book, Ghislain Leroy proposes to reactivate this approach by asking the following question: on what representations of the child are the educational practices of today’s nursery school based?
A school representation of the child
A significant part of the book is devoted to reconstructing the historical evolution of perceptions of children in nursery school since the 1970s. To do this, Leroy draws on a comparative analysis of nursery school programs published between 1977 and 2008, but also on the study of inspection reports produced between 1965 and 2010 which provide information on the activities that are carried out in practice in the classes. The part dealing with contemporary schools also benefits from field observations and interviews conducted by the author between 2009 and 2018. The history presented can be divided into three periods.
The first period studied corresponds to the end of the 1970s, when a transformation that began in the 1960s reached maturity. For Leroy, since its creation in 1830, the nursery school (then called “asylum room”) has been primarily directed by concern for the physiological needs of the child. The high infant mortality rate at the end of the XIXe century, linked to epidemics, can explain the importance then given to hygiene issues. At that time, the child expert was above all a doctor, that is to say a specialist in the body. From the 1960s onwards, the representation of the child took a psychological turn and it was towards the psychoanalyst that we turned more willingly to know what to do to educate children well. We thus began to consider the child as a being with psychological needs, and not just physiological ones. In accordance with the psychoanalytic ideas that were very influential at the time, the representations of the child were explained in the 1977 programmes based on notions such as affectivity or creativity: the child is an individuality, a “Me”, who develops by externalising his impulses (by an act of expression, of creation), which is only possible if he is in an environment that provides him with sufficient emotional security. Educational practices linked to this representation expressive of the child prioritize situations that encourage creative expression (drawing, singing, etc.) while leaving more academic activities (writing, reading, etc.) in the background.
At the end of the 1980s, a second period began, characterized both by a distrust of “libertarian” conceptions of education and by a more direct affirmation of the restrictive nature of nursery school. Here, representations of the child are expressed based on categories of rules or autonomy: the child is a being who can only become free by learning to accept external constraints. We are therefore witnessing a revaluation of schoolwork and the establishment of educational systems encouraging independent work (for example, by working on worksheets). Creativity and concern for the child’s emotional security, although relegated to the background, are not completely absent from the practices of this period, which can be considered a period of transition.
The third period, in which we are situated today, begins at the end of the 1990s. It is marked by what Leroy calls the “emancipation of the school representation of the child” (p. 35). The latter is then represented as a being who must acquire the “fundamental knowledge” that will allow him to succeed in elementary school. The educational practices implemented in this context are mainly academic, that is to say defined by precise educational objectives that can be linked to the emblematic tasks of elementary school (reading, writing, calculation, etc.).
Overall, the story that Leroy paints is one of a gradual but very clear shift from a conception of the child defined by affectivity to a conception of the child defined by instruction.
A school of child performance, stress and inequality
On this basis, one may wonder whether the school representations of the child do not sometimes lead teachers to set up situations which hinder the learning of certain children. Leroy’s criticism of nursery school can be summarised in two stages.
First, contemporary nursery school is considered stressful for children. Concerned about the academic profitability of their practices, teachers become deaf to children’s requests for emotional assistance and create an austere classroom climate that can be a source of discomfort.
Then, the school form of the activities offered is unfavourable to the weakest pupils who frequently find themselves sidelined from educational activities. Teachers seem to consider that the necessary dispositions to be in a situation of success in school work (autonomy, concentration, discipline, immobility, etc.) depend on the responsibility of the child more than on learning that would take place at school – as evidenced by the assessments of evaluation booklets in which the expectation that the child makes “efforts to respect the rules of life more” can be expressed (p. 113). The school representation of the child is thus actualised in a school “of child performance” (p. 147) which seeks to be always more “profitable” academically and which places on the shoulders of the pupils the responsibility for their performance.
A school representation that moves away from new teaching methods
A strong point of the book is the reflection that the author proposes around “new pedagogies” in the educational practices of contemporary nursery school. As a reminder, the expression “new pedagogy” generally refers to educational practices inspired by the proposals of pedagogues such as Decroly, Montessori or Dewey. For Leroy, these different pedagogical approaches are found in the requirement of an education centered on the desires and interests of the child. Field feedback shows that nursery school is no longer the place that was so favorable to the development of these pedagogies in the 1960s and 1970s. On the contrary, today’s teachers are often skeptical and criticize new pedagogies for not taking sufficient account of the imperative internalization of constraints related to the organization and activities of the class.
However, activist teachers still seek to maintain a link with the spirit of new pedagogies, in particular by using a “project” pedagogy. The term “project” here refers to the fact of linking school activities to a purpose intended to motivate students (a correspondence, an outing, etc.), a purpose which at the same time allows thematic unification of school activities relating to different areas of expertise: the trip to the sea is thus linked to reading albums about the sea, to a study of marine animals, to the pre-reading of words related to the sea, to the making and sale of objects made to finance the outing, etc. (example given p. 67) Leroy notes, however, the presence of a “gap” between what teachers say about their pedagogy and what they actually do in practice. In the field, we observe strongly directed projects, decided by the teacher without any real moments of debate being set up. It seems then that the school representation of the child leads teachers to be able to consider the proposals of new pedagogies only in a degraded way and ultimately not very faithful to their original spirit. In the last chapter of the book, Leroy accentuates this observation by showing that among teachers inspired by Montessori pedagogies, the educational practices observed remain strongly conditioned by the school representation of the child and are subject to the same criticisms as those addressed rather to the “traditional” nursery school.
Critical point of view and reflexivity of the actors
Leroy offers a very informative description of the educational practices of contemporary nursery schools and provides elements that allow us to situate them in recent history. However, it is regrettable that, in its critical dimension, the work does not seem to quite achieve its goal. In his conclusion, Leroy says he wants to follow the approach of Éric Plaisance and develop a sociology that explains unnoticed contradictions in school practices and that offers actors the possibility of better understanding and adjusting what they do (p. 146). While this program is certainly the one that must be continued, it is not clear that the critique developed by the author is likely to truly nourish teachers’ reflexivity. The last sentence of the book, which concludes severely that nursery school is a school “in the image of contemporary society: in search of performance and optimization of time, highly competitive and harsh for those left behind” (p. 148), suggests that such a radical criticism is less likely to provoke reflection among the actors than their discouragement or guilt. In our opinion, this final judgment is linked to a form of nostalgia for the affective representation of the 1970s, considered as a kind of lost ideal, stifled by the school representation of the child. In this perspective, the critical relationship that teachers have with regard to their practices (desire to put “meaning” in learning, recourse to the project, etc.) can only be disappointing because it does not express a frank desire to free themselves from a school representation of the child. It seems, however, that it is possible to take seriously the initiatives of these teachers by considering that they aim to reform practices to make them less oppressive and fairer, while maintaining their compatibility with certain school requirements that may need to be partially redefined. In this sense, exposing the contradictions that teachers encounter when they seek to deepen the socializing dimension of school practices seems preferable to criticisms that give the impression that teachers only contribute to the maintenance of a situation that is beyond their control no matter what they do.
We also regret that the author does not go further in the historical contextualization of his argument. We would have liked, for example, to know more about the representations of the child in force before the 1960s and about the stages that lead to the affective representation of the late 1970s. At another level, the question of the influence of new pedagogies on school practices would deserve to be examined as soon as these pedagogies appear (i.e. from the 1920s) without limiting ourselves to the recoveries that were made of them in the 1960s and 1970s.