Culturaliser les difficultés scolaires ? L’exemple des politiques éducatives en Picardie face aux classes populaires blanches

Abstract

Interactions between educational systems and the white working class have been a rising issue for anglo-saxon social scientists as well as public actors. This subject is still, by contrast, less studied by French education science scholars. The article is based on the results and materials gathered by a collective and interdisciplinary research on education (named “Preuve”) in the French deprived region of Picardie. It studies how local educational policies have perceived white working class pupils. Without explicitly naming them, they have gradually, from the 1960s to the 2010s, tended to present them as being ‘culturally backward’. Such a perception has deeply reshaped the educational choices followed in the region (school offer, funding, strategic decisions). These public policies were repeatedly justified by the supposed hostility displayed by this social group towards education.

Keywords

• education policies
• learning difficulties and students in difficulty
• Picardie
• change and innovation
• educational inequalities
• ICT and digital