If we are to believe the media and the French political class, schools, teaching and, more broadly, education are in crisis in our country. There are countless press articles that relay this idea; the same thing on social networks and on television.

The program Zone interdite on the M6 ​​channel broadcast, for example, in November 2023, a documentary with a significant title: “Professors abused, administrative chaos: National Education on the brink of shipwreck” . From the first minutes, on the screen, a brief sequence of filmed archives shows what we guess is a secondary school class of boys in France in the 1960s. It gives way to school scenes from today. The voice-over commentary sets the tone:

“What’s left of that public school, with that respected teacher facing disciplined students? Not much. Everyone knows that.”

The rest of the documentary presents the myriad of ills that overwhelm the institution: absenteeism and the non-replacement of teachers; the haphazard and emergency recruitment of poorly trained contract workers with more than fragile disciplinary skills; schools in a state of profound disrepair; a degraded school climate; almost non-existent authority; largely failing pedagogy and transmission; disastrous management of human resources.

In short, the investigation gives the feeling of a deep crisis in the French school system; because what is a school on the brink of collapse, if not a school in crisis? Without denying certain elements of truth in the content of this documentary, research in the human and social sciences invites us to take a step back from this idea of ​​a crisis in education. First of all, because it is an old cliché; then, because this successful rhetoric contributes to simplifying the data of the educational problem and masks processes of reform of the institution that would benefit from being better known to the general public.

The education crisis, an old leitmotif

First of all, it should be noted that this theme of crisis, applied to teaching and education, is one of the most hackneyed. Its use is in no way specific to a specific national or geographical context. Michel Fize has shown, in this sense, that the idea of ​​a crisis of the family and family education dates back to Antiquity . If, from the 19th ^century  and Romanticism, “each generation will enjoy inventing a crisis with the previous generation”, “the 20th ^and  early 21st ^centuries  are not far behind in talking about abandoned, resigning, abusive families, without authority”.

This discourse of crisis is far from being limited to the family sphere alone. It is also a leitmotif of debates on education and teaching in the 19th ^and  20th ^centuries  . In particular, the decline, even decadence, of the level of students and of authority in schools is already deplored. In 1904-1905, Émile Durkheim noted: “Secondary education has been going through a serious crisis for more than half a century that has not yet, far from it, reached its conclusion. “

In primary schools too, this theme of crisis is a commonplace. Under the Third ^Republic  , a period often presented as a “golden age” of schooling in France, the “primary peril” was debated in the National Assembly to evoke the recruitment crisis encountered in the 1890s by the normal schools intended to train the black hussars of the Republic.

This idea of ​​crisis also came to the forefront of the media and political scene on several occasions during the second half of the 20th ^century  . It denounced “the socio-professional malaise” of primary school teachers and “the decline in the status of secondary school teachers” in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1980s and 1990s, teacher recruitment crises were also highlighted.

A “public problem” from the 1980s in France

It was at the beginning of the 1980s, when the consequences of the massification and systemization of education began to be felt, that the crisis became “a public problem” in the French debate on education. This contributed to the lasting establishment of a “school quarrel” between “Republicans” and “Educators” , which projected education to the front pages of the press.

The pedagogical question occupies an important place in these media debates on the “crisis” of the school: the “Republicans” generally consider that the successive pedagogical renovations (in connection with the institutionalization of educational sciences and the university-based training of teachers) proposed by the “Pedagogues” have had the effect of a deleterious transformation of the school characterized by a loss of authority of teachers and a drop in the level of students.

Although it is popular, this opposition between “Educators” and “Republicans”, or between “those who want to change the School” and “those who intend to save it” , is nevertheless part of a media staging that does not really correspond to the historical reality of the French school . Indeed, it was, for example, the Republicans of the Third ^Republic  who created the first chairs of educational science in France in the 1880s and 1890s, some of which were occupied by leading figures such as Émile Durkheim and Ferdinand Buisson.

Despite its overused use, the success of this idea of ​​crisis and its longevity in the educational field as well as in the public space can be explained, in large part, by the dimension of affectivity and the feeling of urgency or catastrophe that it conveys. From this point of view, the semantic vagueness surrounding this notion opens the door to a diversity of interpretations, often opposed, and favors the emergence of debates and controversies regarding the political, institutional and pedagogical measures to be taken to remedy it.

What is hidden behind this crisis rhetoric?

The crisis discourse used in public debate is not politically neutral: it always calls for or initiates a form of action on the part of public authorities to resolve problems deemed to be pressing.

From this point of view, research has shown that, since the 2000s, this rhetoric of crisis has contributed to the acceleration of new public management policies, in particular contractualisation and managerial rationalisation , within National Education.

Author Bio: Sebastien-Akira Alix is a Lecturer in educational and training sciences at Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne University (UPEC