Inventing the Future of France: Democratization of Education and Making New Kinds of People in Post-WWII

• In Event: Improving Education for a More Sustainable World

Proposal

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, 2008; Rémond, 2003; Ross, 1996). This paper examines what was at play when Post-WWII France modernized and democratized its education system, and how over the course of a 30-year period new categories of students became common sense, doxic, ways of understanding and viewing them. 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, or carte, published in 1967. The carte 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.
This study uses Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu theories to unthink and de-naturalize common views of the students. It also reappropriates some of their terms by either keeping them in French or giving them a new terminology with the goal of further de-naturalizing doxing the idea of spatial formations. This research also folds them back into their historical period and address their research as cultural artifacts because their works are social or educational commentary on that time period (Foucault and Bourdieu), or because they had a direct impact on the education system and students themselves (Bourdieu and Deleuze). Their theorical tools help think about the conditions make it possible for France to imagine a single carte.
To discuss the epistemic break and systems of reason, (Popkewitz, 2015), the mechanisms and conditions of differentiation, categorization and distinction but also normalization, standardization and regularization frame the educational context and its participants, this paper first draws on Deleuze’s reappropriation of Foucault’s concept of historical formation as well as Deleuze’s notion of deterritorializations and reterritorialization which is re-termed de-formationalization and re-formationalization because ‘territorialize’ implies some kind of human activity within a geographical location and can have connotations of colonialization. This research is interested in the creation of new entities that may not be geographically specific but could be new intellectual spaces or ideas, new kinds of people, or new assemblages of different entities. Specifically of interest with regards to formations is Deleuze’s lectures on Foucault entitled Sur les formations historiques, On Historical Formations (my translation) (Deleuze, 1985).
The point of using Deleuze’s reformulation of Foucault is think about historical formations around schools and education instead of presupposing that schools have always made the same kind of students, with the same outcome and future timeline in mind. Consequently, this research asks when did the idea of school consider today’s way of seeing students, how did it become the place of visibility of the newly differentiated and categorized student and from what regime of utterance did it emerge from? More specifically, this research asks: what are the mechanisms and conditions of differentiation, categorization and distinction but also normalization, standardization and regularization assembled through guidelines, rules, regulations, practices, routines and traditions that frame the educational context and its participants in France in 1967 to allow the formation of the carte scolaire?.
Along with the historical theories just summarized, this research also addresses the visual aspect of the carte in terms of how it relates to new educational formation and draws on theories around the ‘visual turn in education’ (Popkewitz, 2013) and ways of looking at material methodology and material conditions of the body.
For its data, 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 carte, Bourdieu’s seminal books Les Héritiers. Les étudiants et la culture and Distinction. Critique sociale du jugement (Bourdieu, 1964, 1979). This paper also returns Deleuze and Foucault’s writings as cultural artifacts because they contribute to the reconceptualization of France and French students as popular public intellectuals in the media. Finally, this research uses clips from the France’s National Audiovisual Institute Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA) on students in the 1950s and 1960s.
The findings demonstrate the complex dynamics at play when societies modernize and rethink their education system and produce new kinds of students. France is an interesting case study because as Deleuze and Foucault produce the theories that seek to question and denaturalize the conditions that make new people possible, they themselves contribute 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, UW-Madison