Opening, Patrice Huerre
Moral chronicle : Sales know-how in education: a platonic journey, Maria Kakogianni (Paris VIII University)
All forms of domination are concentrated in the performative capacities of language and the sophists were the first to make a business out of their knowledge. When Plato questions the nature of knowledge and what it means to « possess » it, he also asks questions about « exchanging » this knowledge. The pedagogic question changes from being one about knowledge acquisition to one regarding the use of knowledge. How can knowledge not be made an item for sale? The philosopher both has and does not have knowledge. His wisdom is based on doubt and its unbounded nature: it remains to one side and without inviting a response. How is exchange then possible? What forms should educational « transmission » assume in a world of buying and selling?
Actuality : Concerning philosophy and sociology of education. Re-reading the work of Jean-Claude Forquin, André D. Robert (Lyon II University)
Theoretically equidistant from sociology and philosophy, the work of Jean-Claude Forquin, which has too quickly disappeared, occupies a rare place in our intellectual universe. He introduced into France British sociology of the years 1960s to the 1980s. His appropriately philosophical concern was to clarify conceptually and resolve rationally the problems and the challenges of the questions that he raised. He identifies the sociology of the curriculum as the central question in the relationship between culture and the school. His epistemological perspective lies between critical deconstruction and the demands of reason. Against the relativism inherent in sociological thought, he poses the question of the conditions of truth (validity) of the possibility (normative, universal?) of knowledge and of its trasmission.
Report: Adolescences
Presentation, Alain Vergnioux
Delarative and performative discourse around the age of adolescence, Laurence Gavarini (Paris VIII University)
According to what processes do teenagers in schools, those places of sharing and confrontation, express themselves towards others and themselves and how do they represent the question of gender (differences between the sexes, sexualisation, relationships between the sexes)? One of the hypotheses of this article is that the phase of « adolescence » is driven by a performative « narrative » directed towards the future and the question of finding a « new » place in society. But in so doing the adolescence assumes in an anticipatory fashion adult « status ». This makes it impossible for adolescents to refer to the past or to the educational tradition. Laurence Gavarini returns to the idea of « crisis » and casts doubt on the discourse concerning « lack of bearings ». In such a confusing context, the school indeed appears to be the institution best able to facilitate rites of passage, the symbolic transitions necessary, when our societies seem incapable of constructing adolescent otherness. In focus groups on the issue of autonomy and identity, differences between girls and boys have been voiced according to various processes, the distinction between the sexes occupying a central place therein.
The legacy of the grand tour as a cosmopolitan Bildung, Vincenzo Cicchelli (Paris V University)
The movement and exchanges of students in the Erasmus programme have the characteristics of a European Bildung. V. Cicchelli turns back to Goethe’s tradition of an educational journey. In this journey geographical mobility coincides in adolescents with an exploration of interiority to disclose a general matrix, and represents a search in an uncertain world, hospitality and hostility… The author studies its changing representations in the 20th century in fiction and cinema.
Adolescents and their absence of stories, Ilaria Pirone (Paris VIII University)
The author gives an account of a workshop in fiction through cinema where teenagers are invited to construct a collective history. Based on the P. Ricœur’s notions of narrative identity, the hypothesis claims that young adolescents should be able to « reconfigure » themselves and to re-construct themselves in their relationship to the other, by means of the symbolic mediation of language. When the narrative is not « developed » (due to absence of narrative construction, syntactical incoherence) the connection with time appears strongly disturbed. By contrast, the collective involvement in the shaping of a scenario, filming and editing contribute to the emergence in the group of new symbolic « link » and of new constructions of identity, prompting processes of subjectification which had remained unformed or in a state of disrepair.
The teenagers of the 1960s: the rôle of Salut les copains!, Jean-Marc Lemonnier (University of Caen) and Alain Vergnioux (University of Caen)
The 1960s saw the appearance of youth as a new « social class », clearly identified by its culture and values, driven by the development of consumerism and the power of the mass media. The article studies the principal dimensions of this teenage culture in the « youth » or « idols » press of which Salut les copains was the standard bearer. The culture was characterised by carelessness, love of dancing and music, freedom of the body and the search for pleasure. But boy-girl relationships remained marked by gender identities that were still traditional.
Childhood and the years of adolescence, Graciela Frigerio (University of Buenos Aires)
The text by Graciela Frigerio was presented at international symposium of the Centre d’études multidisciplinaires (CEM) in Buenos Aires entitles « Notes on speaking in plural forms (childhood and the years of adolescence), units (theories and experiences) and work, marking the beginning of a space ». We thank her for allowing us to publish it in this issue. According to her analyses the experience of adolescence is one of deterritorialisation, the assignation of an existence on the « edges ». Living is « drawing the limits », borderlines, without identity and without limits. Adolescence is the non-stop spilling over, going beyond limits as an unbalanced tight-rope walker.
Medical concepts and the shaping of the modern category of adolescence, Jacques Arveiller (University of Caen)
The notion of adolescence has been shaped historically based on a medical tradition derived from antiquity, together with, at the start of the eighteenth century, the concept of « illnesses according to age » (for every age span, an accompanying illness). A century later, L’École de Paris proposed new distinctions throughout life, based this time on physiological criteria, such as puberty. With the attribution of a more extensive role to the brain in the first part of the nineteenth century, theories which placed the genital organs as the source of pathology were superseded by others that saw the brain govern these organs, with the notion of cerebral puberty. In psychiatry these « passions of puberty » were described, but not really developed until 1858. This happened with the identification of psychological anorexia (1860-1873) and hebephrenia (1871). The conference of 1900 in Paris made a synthesis of the psychoses accompanying adolescence that emphasised theories based on heredity and anthropology that were prevalent at the time. It was then, with the work of G. Stanley Hall in 1904, who, among others, had inherited of previous medical conceptions, that adolescence became a social phase of human life, as we understand it today.
The adolescent phase: living in the interstices, Aurélie Maurin (Paris VIII University)
Who are adolescents? What are their lifeworlds? There are the principal questions raised by Aurélie Morin in respect of the process of adolescence, in as far as this state of life seems less a phase but rather a specific way of thinking and of being in a particular habitus. Psychoanalysis and philosophy are drawn upon but there is a clinical dimension informing her analyses. She brings together several groups of between five and ten adolescents to be photographers of their environments before becoming the critics of these images. It is an original plan of research entitled « Photos of teenagers » that provides the essential and first subject of her hypotheses. Based on these photographs, but especially on the words that accompany them, she questions the adolescents’ worlds, those that that are reserved or conceded to them, and those of which they take possession, particularly those located in educational institutions, as paradigmatic of the being of the adolescent.
Studies : Towards an « ethics of pedagogy », Loïc Chalmel (Nancy II University)
It is a matter of characterising the status of the of the « idea » of pedagogy in its disconnection from current theories and practices, in the emergence of a new rationality, a dialectic, brought about by the very appearance of the « pedagogue ». The latter should incorporate into his discourse the idea that motivates him and the conditions of its realisation. It an experiment marked at once by a sense of the problem and the necessity to put it to the test. He works through interpretation, resistances, paradox. This very specific « intelligence » of sense and of means, the alert exercise of a certain critical rationality should not assume, according to the author, an « ethical positioning ». This intelligence consists in acknowledging the complexity of educational situations and in renouncing, epistemologically, any project of completion, in order to move forward in « uncertain thought ».