Inventing the Future of France: The Academic Map and Making New Kinds of People

• In Event: Certainty Amid Uncertainty in the Future: Making Kinds of People

Abstract

Objectives
The post-WWII (1945-1975) modernization, urbanization, population increase of France created an epistemic break, news ways of knowing and experiencing the world, that ushered in a reconceptualization of time, space and visuality (Sirinelli, 2007, 2008; Rémond, 2003; Ross, 1996). This paper examines what was at play when Post-WWII France modernized and rethought its education system and how over the course of a 30-year period new categories of students became common sense, doxic, and truthful ways of understanding and viewing students. Through these changes, this study is interested in how France (un)forms, (re)forms and (in)forms the educational space and makes a new kind of student body. The making of new ‘students’ is instantiated in the carte scolaire, academic map, published in 1967. The academic map was created because there was no centralized system of educational statistics and, with the growing number of baby boomers and the mass migration to the cities, France had to locate its students so it could prepare and map out its future. In locating its students and then categorizing them, France created now taken-for-granted categories of students.
Perspectives or theoretical framework
I draw on the historico-philosophical traditions of Ian Hacking, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. I draw on these three theorists because they ask in separate ways: what are the conditions that make doxic notions of people possible? Of interest in Hacking’s work is the idea of making up kinds of people (Hacking, 2002). From Foucault’s work on history, I draw on the idea that history is not continuous, nor a progression as often found in mainstream historical narrative. Discontinuities in history underscore that history is neither teleological nor causal. History has fault lines. Continuity presupposes clear and ‘natural’ lines of development and progression that reinforce common sense notions of the world and, in this study, the student (Foucault 2014, 1984). From Deleuze’s university lectures on Foucault, I rework the concepts of historical formation and truth-making (Deleuze, 1985).
Data and Methods
This study uses La Revue administrative, an independent publication created in 1948, which explicated the government’s decision-making process, including the creation of the academic map and Bourdieu’s seminal books Distinction and The Inheritors: French students and their relation to culture (Bourdieu, 1964, 1979). I also return Deleuze and Foucault’s writings as they contribute to the reconceptualization of France and French students as popular public intellectuals in the media and for French university students.
Findings and Scholarly Significance
The findings demonstrate the complex dynamics at play when societies modernize and rethink their education system. France is an interesting case study because as Deleuze and Foucault were asking what are the conditions of possibility for old and new assemblages or formations and how do views come to be understood as doxic and truthful? Concomitantly, they were contributing to this truth formation. A secondary result of this paper is that it also offers a context to the works of Deleuze, Foucault, and Bourdieu.

Author

• Britt-Marie Zeidler, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author