Conference Program

Using empirical material collected for my PhD thesis, this abstract aims at understanding the concrete actions of educations policies claiming to « teach citizenship » to children, inside and outside of schools and their receptions by children. In France, in the aftermaths of the terrorist attacks of 2015, successive governments put clear emphasis on the so-called « éducation à la citoyenneté » (citizenship education). This teaching was designed to form pupils, from an early age all the way through their majority, to become politically active citizen and to engage accordingly in society (Barrère & Martuccelli, 1998; Xypas, 2003; Bozec, 2016). However, this program remains very unclear on the real meaning of its aim.

In this abstract, I will try to demonstrate two main points. Drawing on Patrick Rayou (2000), my work tries to show that the concept of citizenship, as intended in education policies, is notable for its vagueness and polysemy and should be regarded as a social and educational construct, whose definition is the subject of constant discussion and political wrestling. Among many points, public policies, both on national and local levels, have come short to provide a consensus on the topic of children political status in the making of policies regarding their direct environment. The question of children as political actors is therefore continuously unanswered and the political discourse is revolving around a voluntary blurring between a vision of children as future citizens and a vision of children as an actual citizen of the world in which he lives.

Secondly, this vagueness in political definitions has had consequences in the research both in the field of political sociology and of education sociology: depending on the vision of citizenship that is mobilized, children are to be considered either as political actors with an agency (Garnier, 2015) or as passive publics of public policies. I propose an approach inspired by the work of James C. Scott (1990) that allows for the development of a 'hidden transcript’ through which children, even in dispositifs (Foucault, 1993) that do not consider them as legitimate actors, present a critical discourse and seek to assert a certain number of positions. Using data from ethnographic observations, I will try to show how children develop resistance strategies in social relationships with adults that are more or less strict but always unequal.