Investigating multiple modernities in Western pedagogies and cultures: the case of France

• In Event: Multiple modernities from the South to the North: history of the present, cultural differences and social pathologies.

Proposal

Over centuries in the West, pedagogy has been subjected to strong ideological and political commitments. Schooling that became standardized in 18th-century built disciplinary and epistemological norms, as Michel Foucault has clearly shown. From disciplinary techniques to "reading, writing and counting", education policies and systems gradually shaped the image of a school child-citizen enlightened in transmitting knowledge and learning rules. Despite pedagogical criticisms addressed to this conception of children education, it has become universalized, even under colonial and cultural dominations, with resistance developed by international pedagogical movements claiming education as a "common good" detached from the State and business interests and standardization. By rehabilitating pedagogies, in a comparative perspective, in their cultural and scholarly dimensions but also in their alternative definitions of the self and agency, this contribution will relativize any idealistic, universal and pedagogical rationality claimed in digitalization. It explores through the French case how modernity has forged different ways of learning, socializing and including children and educators. Civility, the sacred, or religion must be considered with some openness to understand diverse social experiences related to the educated and digitalization that combine moral virtues and capacities in common spaces and temporalities. Thinking about digital modernity in education requires to consider plural common goods, forms of life and multiple selves without reducing them to a fixed identity based on irreducible principles of standardization, but rather examining some potentialities for creative action or no-action far from normative discourses and ideologies about the digital miracle.


References

Gorur, R., Landri, P., & Normand, R. (Eds.). (2023). Rethinking Sociological Critique in Contemporary Education: Reflexive Dialogue and Prospective Inquiry. Taylor & Francis.
Normand, R. (2023). Convention theory and sociologies in education: A constructive and reflexive dialogue to renew the critique of neoliberalism and its extension. In Handbook of Economics and Sociology of Conventions (pp. 1-20). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Normand, R. (2023). Sociologies of education in an era of new critique: getting out of methodological nationalism and reconsidering education through a global perspective. In Research Handbook on Public Sociology (pp. 279-293). Edward Elgar Publishing.

Author

• Romuald Normand, University of Strasbourg, France