Les inspecteurs et les « fondamentaux » de l’éducation à l’épreuve des contrôles de l’instruction dans la famille

Abstract

Cet article s'intéresse à la manière dont l'instruction dans la famille, dans le contexte français, met à l'épreuve la définition des « fondamentaux » de l'éducation, compris notamment au sens du « socle commun », à travers les pratiques et les représentations des acteurs chargés de les contrôler. À partir d'une série de trenteet-un entretiens réalisés avec ces derniers, trois types de contrôleurs ont pu être identifiés, correspondant à des trajectoires scolaires ou professionnelles spécifiques. Un premier type, « les contrôleurs républicains », tente de se situer au plus près de la définition institutionnelle des fondamentaux ; un second type, « les contrôleurs inclusifs », redéfinit ces derniers autour du lien social ; un dernier type, « les contrôleurs puérocentrés », valorise plus souvent l'expertise familiale et souligne la spécificité de chaque enfant.

The Intervention Strategies of Resource Persons Monitoring Home Education: A Typology and A Questionnaire

“…He denounces their designation as judges of situations that they have no interest, at least no professional interest, in seeing prosper (p. 42, our translation). Farges and Tenret (2018) find similar characteristics in the republican inspectors. These inspectors tend to defend the expertise of the teachers and to discredit parents who have not been trained in teaching.…”

“…At the centre of this contentious legal and political context, broad discretionary power is left to the resource persons to evaluate the educational situation of these children and make decisions over whether educational standards, clearly established or not, are being satisfied. The legal and institutional standards already differ; the norms and social constructs held by the resource persons (Farges and Tenret, 2018;Terrillon, 2002) and by the parents (Dumond, 2017) only exacerbate these differences. Certain resource persons from Quebec school boards studied by Brabant (2016) even confide that the collaboration and support they are asked to establish with the parent educators put them in a conflict of interests and of values, both with their mission of supporting the public school, and with their own educational convictions.…”

“…At the end of semi-directed interviews with thirty-one inspectors in charge of supervising instruction in families practising home education in France, Farges and Tenret (2018) found similar practices in a sub-group that they called the republican supervisors (p. 57). They often make reference to school programs and levels and use exercises taken from school textbooks to verify the children's knowledge, rather than interact on the basis of the evidence of learning presented by the parents or the child.…”

Families enacting ‘alternative’ schooling choices and the State: A power relationship

“…By trying to silence divergent voices, the government risks further enflaming antiinstitutional discontent and thereby widening the gap between families and the State. It risks moving France from a model of 'inclusion through control' (Farges & Tenret, 2018) to a model of exclusion through coercion. At the time of the legislative debates, some families, distraught, announced their determination to continue educating their chil dren even if it meant disobeying or leaving France.…”

“…The results of the research reveal that the dynamics that operate between 'independent schooling' families and the State have the markings of a power relationship that pits State authority against parents who tend to have low confidence in public schools and may identify with a counterculture. Finally, this recent legislation suggests that the French education system is moving from an educational model of ' inclusion through control' for children learning outside of public schools (Farges et al, 2018) to a model of exclusion through coercion.…”