L’héritage de la méthode suédoise d’éducation physique en France: les conflits de méthode au sein de l’Ecole normale de gymnastique et d’escrime de Joinville au début du XXème siècle

The Swedish physical education method has had a singular destiny in France. Originally created by the Swedish Per Henrik Ling (1776–1839), it first spread in France thanks to German doctors. From 1902, the Swedish method became the official method of the Ecole normale de gymnastique et d’escrime de Joinville. It caused serious dissension first within the army, between Georges Hébert, a naval officer attempting to spread his own method called ‘Méthode naturelle’, and Emile Coste, a major at Joinville school who was a resolute supporter of Ling’s method; then within Joinville school, where, from 1905, Georges Demeny, renowned physiologist, tried to impose his French method ‘Eclectique’. The three protagonists would use arguments focused on the rationality of the Swedish method to legitimize or criticize it. But this explicit stake based on the validity of the link between a scientific culture – anatomy and physiology – and a physical education method does not mask the implicit stake of real power.     

Didactisme et méthode didactique en France: la rationalité de la méthode et l'influence allemande,au début du XXe siècle

The generic term “didactic” has had for a long time in France the rather depreciatory meaning of a formal, expositing method putting the authority of the teacher above active participation of the pupil. Far before the arrival of disciplinary didactics which took place in the 1970s and which acknowledged in France, the German meaning of rational method applied to teaching, there was as early as the beginning of the XXth century a first wave of German Swiss and Belgian influences which enable that underestimated term to regain a rational and reflexive meaning.     

Les effectifs scolarisés en France: XIXème et XXème siècles

This article aims to present an analysis of the change over long periods in school attendance figures in France in the 19th and 20th centuries. The interest of the approach is twofold. Firstly it is of immediate practical interest insofar as it is an original reconstruction of the French educational system. It is also of theoretical interest, as it provides better knowledge of the mechanism regulating the development of the system over a long period. In this respect, reflection is in three parts. First, the chronological series compiled are presented to prepare the statistical analysis. The trends observed are then described and finally a preliminary analysis of the causes of the change is provided, with stress laid on the institutional aspects.     

Education et société dans la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle: de Vallange et ses projets de réforme complète de l'éducation 1710–1740

At the beginning of the 18th century, M. de Vallange proposed a wide‐ranging programme to reform education in France. He intended to introduce teaching methods based on John Locke's works and to create a full‐scale system of new educational institutions. The royal institutions called “collèges” were to be abolished and a secular body of academics in charge of the new ones was to be appointed. The new curriculum proposed by M. de Vallange responded better than the former to the requirements of society, the children's capacity for work, and the new intellectual attainments brought about by the scientific progress of the 17th century.

This project formed part of a larger educational trend that, between 1710 and 1740, brought the notion of education closer to the concept of society.     

Arithmétique populaire et arithmétique savante. Apprentissages et enseignement à la fin du XVIlIe siècle

In response to the increasing demand for education and with the backing of the governmental authorities, new types of schools were founded in Italy in the late 18th and early 19th century. These schools, which were open to everybody, including the poor, taught reading, writing and arithmetic. The aim of the present study is to determine how numeracy changed and became widespread and how it influenced intellectual work. The study examines the techniques and methods used by rural people, who were stili largely il/iterate, to leam to calculate. Also to be kept in mind are the problems for both teachers and students that derived from the introduction of numeracy into the curriculum.     

L’accès des filles à l’enseignement supérieur au Burkina Faso: choix parentaux,parcours d’étudiantes et défis

Girls’ access to higher education in Burkina Faso: parental choices, student trajectories, challenges – What motivates parents from less well-off backgrounds to invest in extended schooling for their daughters? What drives the girls from these backgrounds to stay in the school system up to university level? Many studies on Burkina Faso’s education system show that there are still disparities between girls and boys at all levels, with the gap widening as the level of studies gets higher. Under these conditions, the prospect of pursuing higher education is less certain for girls from less well-off families. Yet, girls from these backgrounds are relatively present at the University of Ouagadougou. Based on a qualitative survey of students and their parents, this article highlights the social rationale determining the specific educational trajectories of these girls. The level of schooling of the older siblings, the girl’s positon in relation to her siblings, or concern for equity are factors in some parents’ decision to enrol their daughters in school. Parents invoke several reasons to justify sending their daughters to university, one of the most frequent being the argument that their daughters faithfully help them in return. As for the students, they mention various motivations to explain why they have persisted with their schooling and university studies, often in difficult circumstances, notably the desire to help their parents. The article also highlights the importance of family support as a factor in girls attending school and university, as well as in the pursuit and success of their studies.     

La perception de quelques difficultés en mathématiques par les professeurs en classe de troisième dans l'enseignement secondaire au sénégal

Sans résumé     

La diffusion de la géographie dans l’enseignement français (fin XIXe siècle,début XXe) : force du mouvement et variété des projets

From the 1860s to the beginning of the twentieth century, the rise of academic geography in industrialized countries resulted from the need to produce geography teachers. The mushrooming of school geography, in turn, reflected a complex mixture of pedagogic thought, of a modernization trend, of nationalism and of imperialism. In France, this context caused the emergence of contrasting models describing the scientific requirements of school geography, from loose relations between scientific and pedagogical spheres to the structural link joining the republican university to the various school levels. This article details the strategy through which a group of scholars of the École normale supérieure led by P. Vidal de la Blache succeeded in creating a cognitive space for a new scientific discipline. It describes briefly its progressive introduction in elementary and in classical secondary teaching and how several older elements remained in programmes and in the school curriculum.     

Culture Politique,Scolarisation et Pratiques d’Appropriation: la Méthode Mutuelle dans le Minas Gerais (Brésil) au XIXe Siècle

This contribution deals with the adoption of the Lancasterian Monitorial System of Education in the State of Minas Gerais (Brazil) during the nineteenth century. The authors analyse the adoption of this device in the normalization of educational practices in schools and in the consolidation of the school system in the region. The structure and culture of a society, which still heavily relied on the work of slaves, framed the appropriation of this pedagogical innovation. The ambivalence between the rhetoric of freedom and independence and the search for new disciplinary devices pervaded all educational efforts and it also did so in the process of appropriation of the method. Along these lines, the authors present the discussion of the liberal elites of the region favouring the method, some new devices introduced in the culture of punishment, and the attitudes of the teachers faced with this innovation.     

Modalités de prise de décision chez les filles et les garçons en la présence ou en l’absence de l’enseignant

How girls and boys take decisions in the presence and absence of a teacher – This work is part of an innovative approach to physical and sports education in Tunisia, and team sports in particular. It uses language studies carried out within the framework of this teaching both to generate a reflective attitude on the part of students, and to identify the effect of gender as a variable in the ways in which they make decisions. Discourse analysis highlights the importance of language output by girls and boys in football teaching when a teacher is present or absent. The teacher is an institutional authority who imposes specific uses of language, and when he/she is absent, emotional tensions predominate and may reflect the repression of ideas that occurs when the teacher is present. Although girls appear to take part in the discussion, their utterances are fewer in number, and their analytical statements less effective than those of boys. Girls never gain the upper hand over boys. The study also suggests a redefinition of social role divisions on the basis of gender – masculinity and femininity.     

La spécialisation des professeurs en question: l’organisation pédagogique au prisme des contraintes matérielles (France, 1865–1941)

ABSTRACT

Worldwide, subject-matter teachers are commonplace in post-elementary schools. Teachers’ specialisation appears as a key characteristic of secondary schools as opposed to the polyvalence of primary school teachers. Historians have already studied the long process of teachers’ specialisation, which started, in France as in Prussia (for example), at the beginning of the nineteenth century and developed alongside secondary school modernisation. Those works have usually focused on professional aspects: the structuration of professional groups thanks to the unification of training and recruiting processes, the organisation of teachers within subject-matter associations etc. However, they have not paid much attention to the resistance opposed by other forms of pedagogical organisation, as if polyvalence were were just a backward anomaly, a backward anomaly, doomed to disappear.

This paper seeks to shed new light on this question using a comparison between the different forms of post-elementary schooling that existed at the same time in France between the last third of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth, when the slow growth of post-elementary schooling was mainly due to the success of subaltern institutions. In those institutions, dedicated to technical education, girls’ secondary education, or upper-lower classes’ education (“primaire supérieur”, “secondaire special”), different kinds of polyvalence or bivalence were experienced in the classrooms. At the same time, specialisation was triumphing in classical secondary education. Why, how and to what extent did specialisation eventually impose itself in these different institutions? To address this question, two types of material are used. On the one hand, the question is studied on a national level, analysing both the legislation and the controversies it arouses in pedagogical and professional reviews. On the other hand, these views and theories are confronted with a prosopography of post-elementary school teachers in one department, Eure-et-Loir, which offers several forms of post-elementary institutions. This question is addressed focusing on literary disciplines (philosophy, French, Latin, Greek, modern languages and history and geography). By narrowing the scope, the intellectual and cultural stakes of the various pedagogical organisations that were implemented or advocated may more easily be grasped.

The first part of the article examines the most common (though relatively untested) hypothesis: there was just one strategy for those who advocated the promotion of subaltern types of post-elementary schooling as part of a democratisation process, and this strategy was reproducing the model of the elite institution, secondary classical education, including its pedagogical organisation, starting with subject-matter teachers. The chronology of the changes, the content of the debates, as well as a comparative inquiry into teachers’ remuneration induces us to discard this hypothesis as insufficient if not irrelevant. For girls’ secondary education, a trade-off may be observed between equalisation (of salaries, rights etc.) and pedagogical alignment. For the other institutions, there was no lack of advocates for the specificity of the pedagogy or of the institution; however, specialisation was usually considered a process that could ameliorate the quality of teaching in these institutions without renouncing its specificity.

In fact, in the period under study, the louder advocates for less specialised teachers came from secondary classical education itself: the specialisation process as well as the fragmentation of the class schedule had pedagogic inconveniences, abundantly noticed and commented on by subject-matter teachers themselves. In the second part, these critics and the two main alternatives suggested by the teachers are examined. The first is linked with the Progressive Education movement (“Education nouvelle” in French). The École des Roches, a private institution, tested an original organisation that combined the tradition of the humanities with the modern characteristic of “Éducation nouvelle”: there was only one teacher for history, geography, French, Latin and Greek. The teacher was thus enabled to practise a pedagogy of interest, as advocated by Ovide Decroly. The second alternative was advocated by some modern language teachers: if modern language teachers could teach French as well as a modern language, this pedagogic organisation could give strong unity to the until then defective “modern” curriculum (without Latin).

The third part turns towards the effective organisation of post-elementary schools in Eure-et-Loir. To what extent were these alternative conceptions of pedagogical organisation implemented? The analysis of individual records of teachers suggests several results. First of all, in small institutions – be they classical secondary institutions like “collèges” or modern ones like “écoles primaires supérieures” – specialisation of services was a luxury that most teachers could not afford. Most of the time, they had to teach several subjects, even if they had been trained for just one. However, polyvalence was not used as an opportunity to make connections between the subjects. Class schedules rarely enabled teachers to use polyvalence as a way to teach several subjects to the same pupils. More often, polyvalence was used by the administration as an expedient that some teachers explicitly tried to escape, for example by asking for a move to a bigger institution.

This mundane reality of small institutions invites us to pay renewed attention to teacher training and its regulation during the same period. At the end of the nineteenth century, teachers’ specialisation had been inextricably linked with the modernisation of universities through the specialisation of the “licence de lettres” in 1880. When this model proved to be partially irrelevant for a significant proportion of post-elementary schools, how did universities react? Were universities fit for something other than training specialised teachers? The answer is yes. The curriculum organisation of the licence opened up several possibilities for training polyvalent teachers. This perspective was still looming at the end of the 1930s.

The curricula of the different post-elementary settings analysed in this article shared the same characteristics: they worked as “serial codes” not as “integrated codes”, to quote Basil Bernstein. Therefore the specialisation, bivalence or polyvalence of the teachers did not have much influence, in itself, on the degree of integration of the curriculum. From this perspective, specialisation could probably guarantee better teaching of the subject matters. However, polyvalent teachers were better suited to small schools than specialist ones. Considering demographic and geographic constraints, there was a clear trade-off between specialisation of teachers and separation of publics. In small cities, it was necessary either to mix the pupils to specialise the teachers, or to accept some kind of polyvalence to keep different types of students separated; the debate was still open during the 1930s. School massification, coeducation and the baby-boom era rapidly settled the matter for small cities after the Second World War, giving way to an effective specialisation of teachers. But the question remained open, until the end of the 1970s, for rural settings.     

Analyses de séances en classe et stabilité des pratiques d’enseignants de mathématiques expérimentés du second degré

In this paper we tackle the issue of an eventual stability of teachers’ activity in the classroom. First we explain what kind of stability is searched and how we look for the chosen characteristics: we analyse the mathematical activity the teacher organises for students during classroom sessions and the way he manages the relationship between students and mathematical tasks. We analyse three one-hour sessions for different groups of 11 year old students on the same content and with the same teacher, and two other sessions for 14 year old and 15 year old students, on analogous contents, with the same teacher (another one). Actually it appears in these two examples that the main stabilities are tied with the precise management of the tasks, at a scale of some minutes, and with some subtle characteristic touches of the teacher’s discourse. We present then a discussion and suggest some inferences of these results.

De Genève à Belo Horizonte,une histoire croisée: circulation,réception et réinterprétation d’un modèle européen des classes spéciales au Brésil des années 1930

L’organisation des classes homogènes selon le niveau de développement mental des élèves et celle des classes spéciales pour les enfants en retard scolaire eut lieu dans les écoles élémentaires de Belo Horizonte, au Brésil, pendant les années de 1930, dans le cadre d’une réforme du système d’éducation, à laquelle participèrent des spécialistes étrangers, et en spécial la psychologue russe Helena Antipoff (1892–1974). Le projet des classes spéciales alors établies et leurs transformations dans le contexte brésilien sont étudiés à partir de données documentaires publiées entre 1930 et 1940. Née en Russie, Antipoff a fait des études supérieures en France (1910–1911), comme stagiaire dans le laboratoire Binet-Simon, et à Genève (1912–1914), à l’Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau, où elle exerça ultérieurement les fonctions d’assistante d’Édouard Claparède (1926–1929). Notre hypothèse est que les classes spéciales créées à Belo Horizonte le furent sur le modèle genevois, et constituèrent un important exemple de circulation et diffusion de connaissances au niveau international, ainsi que de construction de repères dans le domaine de l’éducation spéciale au Brésil. Ainsi, la division des classes par niveau intellectuel mesuré par des tests d’intelligence, l’idée de “l’école sur mesure” proposée par Claparède, le dialogue avec les méthodes suggérées par Alice Descouedres démontrent les relations avec le modèle genevois. En même temps, l’interprétation des résultats des tests comme manifestation d’une forme d’ “intelligence civilisée” et les adaptations des exercices d’orthopédie mentale pour développer cette intelligence demandée par l’école montrent les transformations du modèle dans le contexte brésilien.     

Le produit du talent ou la production de talent? La formation des artistes à l'Académie des beaux‐arts à Anvers aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles

The transition from the Ancient Regime to the contemporary period was often regarded as the transition from a “selective” to a “productive” mode of professional training. The problem, however, is that the product of education is imprisoned in arbitrary practices of signification and cannot be considered objectively. This theoretical conclusions result from researching the genesis of the Academy of fine arts in Antwerp. The creation of the academy in 1663 did not rise from a failed formation on the shop floor or the emergence of an “enlightened” conscience concerning the tranfer of abilities and knowledge. Via teachers, masters and professors, arbitrary and subjective appreciations–on art and the producers of art–were objectified. The difference between the formation offered by the academy and the formation in the corporative workshop had thus nothing to do with the advent of social mobility. Preliminary selection was more important than meritocratic tendencies, and the logic behind the evaluation of the pupils by means of contests aimed at creating or sharpening differences.

     

L’éducation sexuelle,entre médecine,morale et pédagogie: débats transnationaux et réalisations locales (Suisse romande 1890–1930)

Autour de 1900, la question de l’éducation sexuelle de la jeunesse émerge dans plusieurs pays d’Europe occidentale. Tous sont confrontés au processus de déclin de la fécondité maritale, qui suscite de nouvelles préoccupations relatives à la dépopulation et à la dégénérescence. Avec la prise de conscience médicale de la gravité et de la contagiosité des maladies vénériennes, ces inquiétudes prennent la dimension d’un péril national. La nécessité de contrer ces dangers autorise un discours respectable sur la sexualité, qui devient l’objet d’un savoir à diffuser, voire à enseigner dans les écoles. Bien plus qu’une information, l’éducation sexuelle est davantage comprise comme l’imposition de normes, en particulier l’abstinence prémaritale, très largement prônée. Un tel consensus pourrait favoriser la mise en place de projets; or, malgré la profusion de discours, les réalisations concrètes restent rares et controversées, surtout dans le cadre scolaire. Comment expliquer ces difficultés? Cet article analyse les dynamiques entre le niveau transnational (conférences, congrès) et le niveau local, en comparant les discours et mobilisations autour de l’éducation sexuelle dans deux cantons suisses francophones (Vaud et Genève). Nous attachons une attention particulière à la manière dont ces projets sont légitimés scientifiquement et sur quelles disciplines leurs défenseurs s’appuient; nous examinons aussi le rôle du genre dans ces mobilisations, étant donné que les femmes et les féministes s’invitent dans ces débats.