Unschooling nursery school?

Kindergarten has gradually become the first moment of schooling. The influential sociologist and expert Pascale Garnier analyzes the progressive normalization of this school within the French school system, and invites us to question the evidence of its educational nature.

In continuation of the previous work of Pascale Garnier, the main hypothesis of this Sociology of nursery school is that of a schooling from the French nursery school. This hypothesis constitutes the hub of this book, from which a plural sociological analysis unfolds covering multiple objects revealing this schooling process such as the evolution of programs, the professionalism of staff, practices, relationships between families. and school. More broadly, this book constitutes a current tool, available to trainers, students and stakeholders in the education system, keen to think about the contemporary issues of this institution.

Socio-historical analysis of the phenomenon of nursery school enrollment

The French nursery school has always been part of the school: this is its specificity compared to other foreign preschool institutions such as the German kindergarten. That said, it once benefited from a certain isolation within the French education system. Thought as a space ofBefore schooling itself, its specificity, particularly educational, was recognized and was even the subject of a certain national pride. Nursery school enrollment refers to a process of standardization, of loss of specificity of nursery school within the French education system. From 1970 to the present day, nursery school has been remodeled as a segment of school, and no longer as a singular moment preceding it.

There are many institutional reforms explaining this process: the principle of a body of inspectors specific to nursery schools is gradually called into question, men can teach there from 1977, nursery school becomes cycle 1 of the schooling (1989), the assessment enters nursery school (1990s). Schooling is then played out at the level of the evolution of official instructions between 1986 and 2008. A logic of direct preparation for elementary school gradually emerges. The learning that would enable academic success in elementary school, particularly in reading, writing and mathematics, has continued to gain in influence to the detriment of emotional, physical, or living together goals, which were once more influential. The game also loses legitimacy in official texts. These institutional transformations are accompanied by increasing attendance at nursery schools, another face of this schooling with multiple facets connected to each other. All five-year-olds attended kindergarten in 1970, four-year-olds in 1980, three-year-olds in 1995. Nursery school became a three-year course, with its precise learning program, and was similar more and more at the first moment of schooling.

Pascale Garnier offers multiple and complementary explanations for this schooling process. It is linked to a logic of unification and coherence of the entire educational system specific to the 1970s. The idea that nursery school could contribute to the fight against social inequalities is also put forward. In the 1980s, the failures of democratization also played in favor of the educational justification. It strengthened in the 2000s, due to the poor results of French schools in international assessments. More recently, the author also associates this process with a movement of schoolification at work in many countries around the world (Japan in particular), aiming to make economic profit from preschool, within the framework of what seems to be a neo-liberal vision of the education of young children.

Professionals, parents, children, and schooling

With the enrollment of nursery schools, developments in professionalism within the educational institution come into play. From 1989, teachers became school teachersrecruited at BAC + 3 (BAC +5 since 2008). They must be teaching professionals, capable of organizing learning in a rational and efficient way. The model of the kindergarten teacher versed in child psychology, or modeled on the mother, is losing legitimacy. The specificity of nursery education is therefore called into question, particularly at the level of initial training. Pascale Garnier also studies the evolution of certain practices, during the period of schooling, and in particular the transformations of the profession ofATSEM (Specialized Territorial Attaché for Nursery Schools). In the past, the “lady on duty” had to be invisible, not enter classes, and remain confined to cleaning tasks. Today, we expect ATSEM a presence in class, initiatives and an active role of educational assistance for the child or even the implementation of an emotional relationship that the teacher more willingly abandons in favor of teaching tasks. Master relationships / ATSEM therefore seem to have redefined themselves.

The work also seeks to deepen the question of the relationship between school and parents in this context of transformation. The role of reception and education of young children is generally at half mast. The kindergarten teacher (or master) presents himself above all as a specialist in academic learning. An asymmetrical relationship is then established, in particular with parents whose children struggle to play the role expected of them. Some parents, often from working-class backgrounds, are nothing less than “summoned” by teachers and ordered to resolve their child’s academic problems. Pascale Garnier nevertheless wants to show that alternative logics (parents/teachers as “big family”) sometimes emerge sporadically. Schooling does not give rise to a uniform nursery school, parents and staff being driven by plural logics, which the author restores, to avoid a caricatured vision of the contemporary situation.

As such, the book offers a very stimulating reflection on extracurricular activity notebooks. Kindergarten activity books are booming and take very variable forms depending on the publisher. Their development is another way of thinking about preschool education, this time from the family side. The interest of Pascale Garnier’s analysis is to avoid a simplistic discourse. Like the duck-rabbit analyzed by Wittgenstein, we can think of these notebooks as both play objects and school objects. Their success could precisely be explained by this necessarily dual identity. Fun attracts the consumer child, but it can also be linked to the parent who wants to avoid too much preparation for school (while nevertheless accepting the necessity). Likewise, the school character can be appreciated by a parent who seeks to anticipate school problems, but also by the child, who wants to play the grown-up, the student.

Dare to take a non-academic look at nursery school

Where is the nursery school going today? This work recalls that it has experienced a relative institutional turning point since 2012, aiming, in part, to rehabilitate its specificity within the education system. Developments are emerging in this direction at the level of professional training. It is necessary to remember here that Pascale Garnier played an important role in the writing of the new nursery school programs for 2015, which, precisely, offer a certain return to psychological and emotional themes. The conclusion of the book asks the following question: might it not be time to dare to take a step back from nursery school? It could involve the return of a plurality of justifications for nursery school, particularly non-academic ones, thinking that nursery school is also a place of reception and care for early childhood.

Among the many avenues of research opened by the author, we could push further the questioning of professional practices, particularly those of teachers. What relationship with the child is actually implemented in kindergarten today? Is the child only understood as a student? In this case, what forms does this take in the actual relationship with the child (school work, discipline requirements, climate of work and not play?)? And what about the emotional relationship with the child in this school-based kindergarten? It is also the question of the well-being of the child in contemporary kindergarten that is raised here. Giving children a voice on contemporary nursery school, as Pascale Garnier invites in the conclusion of her work, in the continuity of multiple French and especially foreign research, could prove particularly heuristic here. In any case, we can only hope that this synthesis contributes to a broad reflection on this institution often loved by the general public, but very little known, particularly in its recent developments.