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Journal of Education Policy

ISSN: 0268-0939 (Print) 1464-5106 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tedp20

The sociology of pupils

Francois Dubet

To cite this article: Francois Dubet (2000) The sociology of pupils, Journal of Education Policy,15:1, 93-104, DOI: 10.1080/026809300286051

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/026809300286051

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J. EDUCATION POLICY, 2000, VOL. 15, NO. 1, 93±104

The sociology of pupils

FrancËois Dubet

In France the sociology of pupils has for a long time been reduced to the study of social inequalities in connectionwith proximity or distance from teacher expectations. Recent transformations of the educational system, and espe-cially the fact that working-class pupils now attend secondary schools and even higher education in considerableproportions, have brought about a change in researchers’ perspectives. Pupils are less defined by their role as eÂleÁvethan by the way in which, as individuals, they construct and make sense of their school experience. This subjectivemechanism must, however, be understood by taking into account that in France school institutions and society ingeneral distribute social and cultural resources unequally and thus create what may be called `ordeals’ for pupils toovercome.

How strange it seems that in France at the end of the 1980s theMinister of Education’sassertion that `pupils are at the centre of the system’ was seen as quite an event. Whatis surprising is that we had to wait so long for such a seemingly obvious a priori prin-ciple to be actually said, and that it was considered a breakthrough in the history ofFrench education. This does make one wonder, for if pupils are not at the centre ofthe system, who else could possibly be? However, this statement is not self-evidentas can be seen by the many teachers, philosophers and essayists who do discuss andcall into question its legitimacy.

For anyone who is well acquainted with the developments in French educationthis situation is not exactly surprising, given the profound changes in schools overthe years which have brought about a strengthening of the pupil’s central position.To put it simply, schools can be seen less and less as institutions dominating indi-viduals’ conduct, and more and more as educational entities being developed by allthose actively involved in the domain of education, especially the pupils themselves.Educational sociology has gone through a rather similar process. For a long period itcentred its interest on sociological investigation of school structures and mechanisms,without concern for school personnel and pupils, since they were considered as simple`atoms’ `determined’ by the laws that governed the system (Duru-Bellat and vanZanten 1999). Developments in schools and the transformation of sociological para-digms have favoured sociological research which is much more clearly focused onthe educational community, especially on the pupils who little by little are now con-sidered as the active subjects of their own education.

J ournal of Educational Policy ISSN 0268±0939 print/ISSN 1464±5106 online # 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltdhttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/tf/02680939.htm l

FrancËois Dubet is a Professor of Sociology at the University Victor Segalen Bordeaux II. He is also amember of the CADIS-CNRS. He has published extensively on youth’s and pupil’s experience and

on educational democratization. He is the author of several books: La GaleÁre: jeunes en survie (Paris:

Fayard, 1987), Les lyceÂens (Paris: Seuil, 1990), Sociologie de l’expeÂrience (Paris: Seuil, 1994) and (with D.Martuccelli) A l’eÂcole. Sociologie de l’expeÂrience scolaire (Paris: Seuil, 1996).

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It’s this movement into the foreground of pupils and what they experience thatwe would like to deal with in this article. We shall present pupils and their presenceas the vital central concern of schools, rather than attempt to propose an exhaustivetaxonomy or typology of pupils (which is hard to establish since it has to take intoaccount not only the pupils’ socio-economic background, age, cultural level, sex andperformance, but also the nature of educational provision, educational practices,schools and courses followed). Nothing would be more unstable and artificial thanformulating such a typology in an extremely complex system which is being continu-ously transformed.

The republican institution

It is well known that French state schools were founded in the light of a political pro-ject. The Republican school had to firmly establish the stability of the Republic’sinstitutions and build up a modern national consciousness. The Republican schoolwas set the task of spreading a belief in the nation, in the rationalism engendered bythe `LumieÁres’ and in progress. It had to produce the right citizens, which a modernFrance needed and combat the former models of legitimacy and cultural patternswhich religious schools inculcated under the `Ancien reÂgime’. Therefore, schoolswere considered as institutions, which had to `institute’ new subjects for the nation(Nicolet 1982). Therein lies the greatness of this school (see LelieÁvre 2000).

Undoubtedly, as Durkheim argues, this institution had to be adapted to societysuch as it existed, but schools also stand apart `outside’ society in terms of the projectof building a modern national state and thus a kind of subject guided by reason and`against society’. If Durkheim remains the sociologist of the Republican school it’sbecause he bases his conception of education on teaching universal and modernmoral values. Schools had to rescue children from all the cultural and `special-interest’influences found in families, religion and class origins. It is through education thatchildren accessed the `universal’ and developed the qualities which schools tried toreveal and bring forth (Durkheim 1993). The philosopher Alain became the heraldof this conception of education and of non-religious teaching, a conception still verymuch alive in France and well expressed in the distrust which is shown concerningreforms which would make teachers into `psychologists’ or `educators’ or `activityorganizers’, in other words, teachers who would address their pupils in ways otherthan through their reasoning powers (Milner 1984).

This educational policy was based on a clear-cut theoretical separation betweenwhat a child is and what a pupil is, between a private individual with his roots firmlyset in his own particular world and armed with his original personality, and an indi-vidual governed by reason and knowledge, between a `concrete’ individual and an`abstract’ individual. This conception of education was the result of the rationalisminspired by the `LumieÁres’ movement, but also of the political compromise whichgave rise to the non-religious schools. Indeed, this division determined the major dis-tinction in non-religious schools between `instruction’ which was entrusted to stateschools and given over to spreading knowledge, and that of `education’ which wasleft to the private domain of families, associations and churches. Thus, the relationshipbetween teachers and pupils was determined by its neutrality, objectivity and univers-alism.

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Basically, the Republican school’s socialization policy demanded a certain deso-cialization by schools since they had to extract children out of society in order toturn them into pupils and future citizens. Looked at in a practical way, this phenom-enon brought about a gap between schools and society. School activities, whichwere not strictly scholarly such as sport, art, technical design were relegated to thesidelines in the Republican schools. Independent youth activities organized in clubsor pupil associations were afforded even less importance, and teachers always consid-ered that their role was centred on the singular activity of teaching academic knowl-edge. We only have to compare English-speaking education with the French tograsp what is particular to the Republican school. While the former attempts to con-trol and oversee all youth activity seeing it as an essential educational element, thelatter considers such youth activity as a `deviant’ and potentially `dangerous’ phenom-enon (Broadfoot 1988).

In this way, the Republican school is first and foremost a `scholarly’ institution,which hardly cares about professional training. A privileged place is given to abstrac-tion and disinterested knowledge of no practical value, with the most abstract andleast socially useful elements placed on the pinnacle of the scholarly hierarchy. Theseschools carried on the enclosed world and the separation of the sexes in the traditionof the Jesuits. To put it briefly, they only sought to educate pupils based upon theirrelationship to academic knowledge. This educational model carried on that of the`humanities’, one in which education consisted of `training’ children in order to rescuethem from human nature which made them rebellious or submissive, and asDurkheim said, as needing to be `hypnotized’ by their teacher. Education, by itsvery form, had to lead children to find their own intellectual autonomy, a taskwhich was not contradictory with the strict rule of obedience at school.

If wenow turn our attention to the practical side of this model, it’s easy to under-stand why pupils can hardly be considered as being active participants in it. One ofthe essential factors in explaining this is the adjustment of `supply and demand’ in edu-cational matters. What have to be taken into account are the social divisions in a dual-istic system (Prost 1967). Compulsory primary school teaching was the Republic’screation and designed for basic, core learning. It was reserved for children from non-privileged backgrounds who underwent lessons based on repetition with acurriculum which guaranteed the same education for all. It was neither a school forprofessional training nor one that offered social mobility for the majority of pupils.Alongside this school there was the senior secondary school (the lyceÂe) which wasreserved for children of the bourgeoisie and specialized in teaching the humanities.Setting up these two kinds of social groups made the distinction between child andpupil easier.1

The non-privileged children were destined for a limited degree of schooling andtheir obedience was at once legitimate and required. It was only in certain fringe con-cerns that the relation between child and pupil presented itself as a problem. Therewas first of all the question of the `gifted’ pupil that psychologists took charge of,especially Binet who established instruments to measure intelligence (Pinell andZafiropoulos 1978). However, it was the lack of reasoning capacities and innate intel-ligencemore than any subjective learnings of pupils which caused concern for teachersand school administrators. There were some relatively minor educational movementswhich went against the clear-cut division between reason and personality. They didso by advocating more active teaching methods; Freinet comes to mind here, andwe know the resistance his ideas met. Nevertheless, pupils did not usually represent a

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subject to be studied and considered because they were not active participants, merelya simple receptacle for educational activity.

There was also a clear relationship between educational supply and demand at thesenior secondary level based on the supply of a form of teaching demanded by theeÂlite `who shall inherit’, those pupils ready from a social point of view to studyhumanities. For such pupils and students, studying was taken for granted, since itwas natural and in line with the qualities acquired socially through family education.Finally, there were those pupils from working class backgrounds endowed withgrants who succeeded `socially’ through the school, who fell into line with what wasexpected at school to such an extent that their schooling went off perfectly smoothly.These latter pupils always played the part they were expected to play and were notconsidered as actively involved in their own success (Bourdieu and Passeron 1964).

In essence, educational sociology up until the 1960s meant sociology without anyreference to pupils. They were considered as simple subjects undergoing socializationin a `holistic’ conception of school that epitomized the belief in imposing normativeand cultural values. Most of those pupils, who appeared to be `actively involved’ bycausing problems actually belonged to an extreme minority. Partly because theywere excluded from continuing their studies and partly because the belief in the ideol-ogy of the gifted pupil reduced all these difficulties into problems of intelligence andreasoning skills rather than to social and cultural career choices which were difficult-linked to the meaningfulness of school experience for the pupils. To put it anotherway, pupils did not raise any theoretical or epistemological issues because they didnot represent a `practical’ problem, and when they did so, it belonged more to thedomain of psychology than of sociology. Up until the sixties, the major educationalstudies focused on statistics and questioned the impact and function of schools onsocial mobility and the reproduction of social structure. Pupil behaviour was hardlystudied as such and in a `symptomatic’ manner the Langevin-Wallon plan, which setforth the main guidelines concerning mass education, was postulated on a sponta-neous adjustment of supply and demand in education.

Deregulating the sy stem

At the very moment when the old system of regulation fell apart, under the influenceof mass education, pupils became a `problem’ and a subject of sociological analysis.Pupils could be seen as active participants in their own education when it was clearthat the order incarnated in the Republican Institution had lost its hold. Three differ-ent breaches in the system explain how it became undone.2

Mass education brought about a destabilization of the mechanisms governingpupil streaming which was carried out inside the system by a permanent process ofselection and career guidance. Increasingly, pupil career prospects were no longeronly determined by their social status at birth but also by their achievements through-out their school years, their strategies and their choices (Dubet and Martuccelli1996). This did not mean that schools were bastions of equity and that birth did notweigh heavily on a pupil’s chances of success or failure, but these chances could betaken up inside schools via one’s performance and by using the spectrum of choices,opportunities and resources available (Perrenoud 1984). Pupils could be seen as activeparticipants and as `problems’ when it became obvious that their projects, their choicesand their motivations had become essential elements in the running of schools. It

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then became vital to understand how pupils decided on their academic and profes-sional projects, how they envisaged the future, how they and their families developedstrategies. Pupils could be seen as active participants because they had become strategicconsumers who were more or less enlightened and `free’. In this new context it wasno longer possible to simply ignore pupils and this explains the multitude of studiesconcerning pupils’ projects, career choices, ways of thinking about and their steps inworking out choices; all of which were inspired by the view that the general runningof the system could be accounted for by the addition of all these choices into anassembled whole (Boudon 1973, Berthelot 1983). The more the system became amass educational one the more it resembled a `market’, and the more it was necessaryto know about the reasoning and anticipations of active participants in this market.To put it another way, the educational system was not only being structured by edu-cational supply, but also by the demand, and this demand needed to be known.

The second change brought about by mass education concerns the arrival of anew kind of pupil. The tranquil world of the privileged and grant-aided pupils wasshaken by `new’ pupils whose attitudes, expectations and motivations correspondedin no way to the system. In many cases these pupils seemed to represent nothingother than a disorderly element. For a start, they did not come up to the teachers’expectations. Furthermore, they brought in youth culture and a street-wise way ofthinking and behaving into schools. Social problems sprang up such as delinquency,violence and racism, and there was the issue of ethnic minorities to consider. All ofthese problems were not correctly speaking `new’ for society. What was new, how-ever, was their brutal and unexpected emergence in schools. These new kinds ofpupils undermined and overthrew traditional teaching practices. They called intoquestion the meaningfulness of the curriculum and led many teachers to change theirworking methods dramatically. Over the last ten years, many studies have focusedon pupils (Charlot, Bautier and Rochex 1992, Ballion 1994, Payet 1995, Debarbieux1996, Dubet and Martuccelli 1996). This sociological approach often takes socialproblems at school such as racism, pupils’ work and academic life, poverty or violenceas its starting point. Other forms of research deal with pupils’ academic life, their rela-tionship with learning, their motivations, the tensions between youth culture andthe world of the school. Over the last few years studies and understanding of pupil be-haviour have developed considerably because of the need to understand why pupilsno longer correspond to what schools implicitly expect. It is often contemporary con-troversial issues, which determines research subject matter.

But the structural transformation in schools are not the only factors whichexplain the development of the sociology of pupils. Three other major phenomenaof a different nature can also be identified which contribute to this evolution.

A long cultural transformation has installed the supremacy of childhood over thechild’s status as a pupil. This movement manifests itself as a demand to take intoaccount children’s personality and their need to express themselves. Since the sixties,the division between the young seen as pupils, on the one hand, or as children andadolescents, on the other, is less and less readily accepted. Families support a moreexpressive and individualistic form of culture and want schools to take into accounttheir children’s personality and capacity for self-expression. Many educationalistshave expressed this view in their critical reports from inside the school system. Moreactive teaching methods grant more autonomy to pupils and encourage self-expres-sion. However, reacting against this, those who uphold traditional methods defendthem strongly from what they often consider to be the lingering `spirit of 68’. Some

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schools have opened up separate independent premises for pupils, the maisons deslyceÂens or created all sorts of clubs. In the long term, the republican divide betweeneducation and instruction has become less rigid.

Since May 1968 schools have been regularly affected by protest movements ledby higher education students and by lyceÂens who have come to the forefront as activeparticipants in decisions affecting them. Pupils are also active participants in a practicalway, being `aware and organized’, and they can no longer be ignored. Recently, theMinistry of Education has consulted pupil representatives with regard to curriculumreforms. Just as those who govern must negotiate with teachers’ unions they mustalso take into account the explosive protest movements which have become an inte-gral part of the political scene.

Finally, the intellectual climate has changed. Under the influence of sociology inthe English-speaking world, especially the `new’ English educational sociology,there has been a shift from a `holist’ and structuralist-inspired sociology to onewhich is more comprehensive and based more on interaction (Duru-Bellat and vanZanten 1999). If pupils were once considered as simple passive representations of socialpositions, little by little this conception has changed and they are now seen as activeparticipants in society. There is now an increasing number of research projects whichstudy `interaction’ in class, be it analysis of interaction between pupils and teachers,or between the different sexes . . . The `activity’ of being a pupil has become a subjectof enquiry. The sociologists’ gaze has been transformed and ethnographical methodshave developed. French educational sociology is no longer sociology without activeparticipants or pupils.

Over the last thirty years the social and intellectual climate has been profoundlytransformed. Out of the deregulation of the educational system pupils have thrustthemselves to the fore. Once mere educational objects, they have become educational`problems’. Once passive elements in the system, they havebecome active participantseither individually or collectively. Finally, the intellectual and theoretical frameworkhas also been modified. All these transformations show that we have come a longway from the republican model, which has become more a historical and ideologicalreference point than a practical one. Schools are no longer institutions automaticallytransforming given social standards into personalities. They have become systemscombining a various number of tendencies and goals, a system formed by its ownactive participants than they being the ones who are formed by it.

Experiencing school

The goal of this type of sociology, centred on pupils, is to study the way in whichthey construct their own experience of school and not only the way they learn their`skills base’ as pupils. The notion of a pupil’s `skills base’ does in fact seem excessivelynormative. It implies that this `skills base’ can be clearly defined and categorized intoa number of clear and precise skills and abilities which can be ordered and assembledinto a coherent recognizable whole as in all other skilled activity. It so happens thatthis is not the case unless you accept the model case of the bright pupil who excels inthe most prestigious subjects as a standard from which one measures the gap betweeneveryday practice and a theoretical ideal, and if so, then this is solely a normativemodel. In fact, there are actually several ways of being a pupil, and the routes to schoolachievement are many. Moreover, one cannot totally identify educational socializa-

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tion with pupils’ `subjectivation’, that is to say a pupil’s acquisition and acceptance ofschool standards is not the same as his own subjective understanding of the meaningof his school work. Let me explain: school work is neither a `skills base’ like manualfactory work which can be categorized and reproduced, nor a piece of creative worklike an artist’s which has been conceived as an act of self-expression. It is situatedbetween these two poles, representing at once adaptation to constraints and the crea-tion of meaning. One can suggest the following hypothesis: the less school representsan institution, the more pupils have to construct their own learning experience. Thiscan perhaps be defined as a system of tensions between several different rationalapproaches, to borrow Weber’s term (Dubet 1994).

The first of these rational approaches is that of usefulness. Even from a junior sec-ondary school lever, pupils can be seen to be working out strategies like rational-minded individuals who work out their investment at school in terms of costs andprofits. For pupils, school work represents a `cost’, implying personal effort and thesacrifice of leisure time, so as to obtain social benefits based upon the usefulness of pos-sessing certificates after passing school exams. This rational approach based upon use-fulness is reinforced the longer pupils continue to study, but it is always an essentialelement in any pupil’s experience at school. For all pupils wonder what benefits theycan expect from their work. Obviously, the need to foresee what is useful variesgreatly depending on the different specialities pupils study. Certain specialities arevery close to working life, others are further removed and demand a continuous actof putting off commitment till later. Some seem highly useful, others are much lessobviously useful and in such cases the only usefulness perceived by pupils is the rightto carry on studying. The ever-growing hold of choice determined by usefulness isshown in the rise of individual projects. Since the need for schooling is often less andless obvious for some pupils and ill-adapted to their needs, they are asked to workout their own future career projects, but this request is often paradoxical. The weakestpupils are expected to be motivated by personal projects whereas they have fewresources to build and realize such projects. One other consequence stemming froma rational approach based on the usefulness of studies is the development of strategicbehaviour: a pupil’s schooling is seen in terms of building a career and therefore it isvital to make the right choice at the right moment: choosing the right school, theright specialization, the right disciplines which are important and with a worthwhile`yield’.

However, pupils are not solely individuals who manoeuvre strategically andschools cannot simply be reduced to the status of a `market’ because social and culturalattitudes and beliefs rooted in the family play an essential role. For a long period edu-cational sociology, which was dominated by Bourdieu and Passeron’s (1970) work,focussed on this sole dimension which can be defined in terms of social integration. Awhole dimension of school experience was defined by the proximity and the tensionbetween, on the one hand, school culture, and, on the other, pupils’ own youth cul-ture. The difficulty for pupils was to make these two cultural spheres compatible.Either they could link them up into a continuous whole or keep them sealed offfrom one another, or even perceive them as being antagonistic. Even if this rationalapproach depends to a great extent on objective conditions determined by the pupils’socio-economic background, it can’t just simply be reduced to this. It’s well knownthat there are many exceptions to the mechanisms at play, which structurally deter-mine pupils’ career choices. Moreover, nearly all pupils experience a degree of tensionbetween youth culture focused on the present, on leisure activities and solidarity

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with school culture which asks pupils to put off all the above to look to the future andto concentrate on working alone, on being competitive and diligent. In a mass educa-tional system this tension is all the more critical since youth culture tends to affirmitself and seek its own independent status to the point where it can become the virtualopposite of the world of education.

Finally, pupils’ experience of school is to be based upon a relationship withknowledge that conceives it as a way to develop oneself. Pupils `form’ themselvesthrough the meaning they attribute to knowledge, by their acceptance or reluctanceto take up a vocation. There are vocations at school just as there are professional voca-tions, a beruf, a way of finding individual self-achievement through one’s experienceat school. Most evidence shows that pupils are more or less interested in certain dis-ciplines, that is, they feel that through such subjects they can develop themselves,`grow up’, open up to the world and discover themselves. But such evidence alsoreveals that many pupils do not manage to become really interested in learning andthat they find it a ritual devoid of interest or meaning (BarreÁre 1997). Thus somepupils consider their studies as being quite alien to them whereas others, on the con-trary, see themselves as the masters of their chosen studies.

All these dimensions of school experience are related to objective factors belong-ing to social and educational conditions which every pupil must face. Birth, familyplans and expectations, age and sex determine these factors. They are also determinedby places available at school, the kind of school frequented, specialization, professionalopportunities linked to certificates awarded and many other factors too.Nevertheless, nothing allows one to postulate a spontaneous and pre-determinedadjustment of all the dimensions at play in a pupil’s experience of school, and itremains for pupils to construct their own experience, make `decisive choices’ betweencertain alternatives, determine an order of priorities in their choices. At the end ofthe day, pupils must build up their own experience, motivate themselves to do soand give meaning to such an experience of school. It’s in this sense that we can con-sider pupils as active participants and independent subjects. It’s therefore possible todetermine theprincipal ways of `being a pupil’ according to the general principle gov-erning how this experience is mastered.

In school and against school

What are the principal ways of being a pupil? In other words, how do they assemblethe various dimensions of school experience? Rather than creating a descriptive typol-ogy of pupils it’s more advisable to present an overall picture of the whole in areasoned way, showing the hierarchy at work producing the different levels of mas-tery of school experience.

In general, pupils whose social position and educational situation offer them agreat deal of resources are the ones who most easily manage to build up their ownexperience and dominate their chosen studies. First of all, the relatively similar natureof their family life and school allows them to pass from one to the other accordingto their `habitus’ as described by Bourdieu, as well as the close proximity of linguisticcodes a la Bernstein. However, this is far from being an adequate picture becausethere is always a degree of difference between these two cultures, and so the capacityof school organization to establish integration plays a key role here. This can be strongin selective schools or specialized sections where schools take the pupils in hand by

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offering them a certain close relationship with teachers, regular assessment, group loy-alty and a school ethos. School organization is one key to narrowing the gap betweenlife at school and youth culture outside, and to integrating youth culture into thedaily life of the school.

These pupils are also aware that the education they receive is of high social valueand that it offers them bright career prospects. This is often the case with the mostselective and prestigious schools or with vocational training of great worth in thejob market. As a result these pupils know why they have to work at school and theyare able to see the relation between their own personal investment in time and effortwith the rewards to come. They do what is expected of them since their educationallows them to maintain or improve their social position. They are able to envisagetheir own future in a positive light.

Not surprisingly, these pupils adhere wholeheartedly to the model their schooloffers them. They see themselves as future professionals or intellectuals undergoingtheir education and they share the ethos of their form of education and their school.They act as `genuine literary intellectuals’ or `real scientists’, as future engineers or doc-tors because they learn at school or university the ethos and vocational nature oftheir future existence. These pupils or students are often relatively critical of theireducation, but they do so in the spirit of the intelligentsia by contrasting those valuesembodied in their education with the constraints of school organization, routinework, exam pressure, conservatism . . .

Obviously this ideal version of an educational experience which is within thepupil’s control is far from describing real pupil conduct. This experience masters cer-tain tensions, especially the tension between the attitudes adopted due to the competi-tive nature of education and those engendered by the `gratuitousness’ of thevocation. In the same way, pupils can suffer from the sheer weight of integration atschool, tests and exams and conformism. However, these tensions remain part ofones educational experience and pupils make themselves into active subjects more orless in control of their life at school, as subjects endowed with the ability to givemean-ing to their studies.

The opposite of this ideal version can be found among those pupils who do notpossess the adequate resources allowing them to take advantage of their educationalexperience. In their eyes, the barrier between youth culture on the one hand and theworld of education on the other is quite insurmountable. Pupils often even refuse to`betray’ their peer group by `co-operating’ with school discipline measures (Willis1977). It is in the most underprivileged schools that we most frequently witness thiskind of conduct. However, the more the system becomes a mass educational oneand the more youth culture affirms its own autonomous identity the more the ten-sions become a key issue between the world of youth and the world of education. InFrance, as in the USA, this tension can reach such proportions that schools in under-privileged districts have to set up professional security systems to counter street cul-ture in order to protect pupils and staff from the violence threatening schools.

The massive increase in the number of diplomas and certificates awarded topupils has brought about an `inflationary’ process concerning a certain number ofthem. The usefulness of some educational courses or training schemes has consider-ably declined, and the weakest pupils can rightly feel that it’s not worthwhile study-ing at all since it leads to nothing, apart from temporarily keeping them off theunemployment queues or facing the hard ordeal of finding a job. In this context apupil’s personal investment in studying seems useless or with little chance of being

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fruitful. Schools provide the semblance of having a recognized position and statue inlife more than actually preparing such pupils for any future they might wish for.

For such pupils the knowledge and culture found at school are of little use to theirpersonal development. Such learning is seen simply as a means of selection; the con-tent is too far removed from their lifestyles to give any real meaning to studying. Toput it briefly, these pupils can’t manage to identify themselves with such an academicculture, which seems alien, arbitrary and devoid of interest.

In such cases, not only does it become difficult to create an educational experienceand live out fully one’s role as an active participant in school, but what is worse, itcan be perceived as being threatening and `dangerous’. Indeed, these pupils stand inthe very centre of a mass educational system based at once on democracy and selec-tion. Their failure and relegation deeply affect their ego and personal dignity. Insuch cases, these pupils can choose to adopt two strategies.

Some decide to no longer play the game. Everything goes on at school as if theyknow that schoolwork is to no avail since it can only lead to a series of frustrationsand eventual failure. The only thing they expect from school is a temporary protec-tive environment and so they only do the minimum amount of work so as not to beexpelled. They do try to keep up the belief in the whole school framework, but theframework is empty and devoid of content. Subjectively speaking, these junior andsenior secondary school pupils or students are no longer pupils or students. They areyouths who no longer take part in the kind of future life which schools draw up forthem. They see education as a backdrop and try to defend themselves as much as poss-ible from academic judgements in their performance.

Other pupils rebel. They refuse the severe criticism and judgements, which castthem out of the system, and they combat the world of education with violence.These youths prefer conflict and take up an adverse position against school, againstteachers who are seen as enemies who make them lose face in the world. A great dealof violence at school can be explained in this way.

Between these two major extremes representing educational experience there liea wealth of different forms of pupil’s conduct which oscillate between one and theother, borrowing from oneor the other according to theparticular natureof the situa-tion at school and the pupil’s school record. It is also possible to describe the variouseducational experiences according to the level of schooling. If primary schooling isdominated by theprinciple of integration, junior secondary level witnesses the under-mining of this principle by the growing autonomy expressed in youth culture andcriticism of schools’ uselessness, and at senior secondary level there is pupil control ofthe educational experience or, on the opposite, pupil dispersal. However in everycase, two phenomena must be understood. Firstly, pupils must be considered as activeparticipants in their own education since it is they who are obliged to give it meaningand form; secondly, the conditions for working it out do not solely depend on pupils’social background, but also on their school record and performance, and on the edu-cational means available. Thus, it varies according to the specialized subjects, schoolsand teachers the pupils have.

Conclusion

Objections will be raised to the picture sketched out in this article that educationalsociology has always been interested in pupils. How could it otherwise be? But for a

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long time, it was not interested in pupils in terms of their being active participants atschool. This was due at once to dominant sociological paradigms but, even moredeci-sively, to the conception of pupils embedded in the model created by state educationin France. Pupils have become a subject of study over the last few years as the formereducational system was destabilized by the impact of mass education, by certain cul-tural transformations and by the economic crisis. Pupils became a sociological subjectbecause they seemed to be at once a source of problems and also active participants ineducation. This social transformation was also concomitant with a transformation inthe sociological paradigm. It could also be shown that a parallel development hastaken place with regard to schools and, to a certain extent, with teachers.

Having said this, the sociology of pupils remains to be developed as a sociologicalstudy of school work and the education of an individual subject through this work.This development will probably give rise to the mixing-up and the restructuring ofthe frontiers between the human sciences which must propose new theories of sociali-zation, integrating both cognitive and normative dimensions, and, above all, capableof considering socialization as an activity and not just as a simple inculcation.However, the sociology of pupils is not just a theoretical problem. There are also pol-itical stakes: knowing what pupils think and how they become themselves impliesan overwhelming transformation in our very conception of education.

Acknowledgem ents

The author is grateful to J. Fitzpatrick for the translation of this paper.

Notes

1. This brief outline does not take into account pre-elementary schooling, which, on the contrary, directs itself asmuch towards the child as to the pupil thanks to the action of Pauline Kergomard.

2. Certain criticisms strictly confined to internal French debates accuse the author of this article of wishing the endof the Rebublican school because he shows up everything which separates the model from reality. These criticsbrandish the greatness of some of Condorcet’s or Ferry `s texts in opposition to the cruel hard facts and statistics.Enclosing oneself in a world of ideological nostalgia is certainly not the best way to defend the Republicanschool.

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