“It is societal changes that force the school to change”
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Eric Alary is a historian and professor of history in CPGE. He just published a History of children, from the 1890s to the present day (Pasts compounds, 336 p., 23 euros).
The French school seems to have difficulty updating the issue of well-being, as if it were reluctant to take into account the fact that students also have bodies. Are there historical reasons for this?
Let us first recall that the Catholic Church dominated education until the end of the Second Empire. In religious education, the body could only let off steam during a break, during which running freely was not allowed. Among the Jesuits, even the time of recreation was a pedagogical time: it was a question of predisposing the body so that the soul was able to swallow knowledge.
When the republican school was born, the child was considered to be an adult in miniature. The school will for a long time stay away from a global vision of the child. At the turn of the century, for example, it ignored the gaze of paediatricians, a discipline which nevertheless took off just before the Great War. That there may be physical discomfort at school is obvious: but we do not wonder if it is a good thing or not.
The school will therefore remain imbued with a military imaginary (one speaks of “hussars” to qualify teachers) and religious – no doubt reluctantly, but the result is the same: everything is masterful, everything is difficult for the pupil, whom the teacher is moreover authorized to correct.
The question of the well-being of the child as we pose it today may also have to do with taking into account his individuality. However, the school has always had trouble with this: its role, historically, is to train citizens, who are all made from the same mould. If in the 1920s, pedagogues like Montessori and Freinet were considered sweet dreamers, it was also because they offered the absolute opposite of this system.
It’s a bit paradoxical, insofar as the school also takes charge of the “physical education” of the children… It still takes care of their bodies, doesn’t it?
That of the boys, yes! In the early 1880s, Jules Ferry made physical education compulsory for boys, but not for girls. And for good reason, it is above all a question of training future soldiers. In a society traumatized by the shock of the defeat at Sedan (in 1870 against Prussia), there is a convergence of points of view, between the Republicans, the monarchist soldiers and the Church, on the idea of rapidly forming young citizens to take revenge on Germany.
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