DEROUET JEAN-LOUIS

Institut National de Recherche Pédagogique (National institute for research in education)

Presentation: false breaks and true continuity

This seminar was thought and organised as part of a restructured INRP that will become part of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in early 2011. The current name and legal status of this institute date back to 1976 but the pedagogical museum established in 1879 by Ferdinand Buisson, the author of a famous dictionary of pedagogy and close to Jules Ferry, marked its initial foundation. This symposium is not exactly the last form in INRP’s current form as the Centre Alain Savary arranges a symposium on inequalities in education on November 29 and 30. However, I think it is useful to set our approach in a larger framework on the eve of a decisive event. It involves outlining the existing links in four fields at least:

· The developments of societies and education policies since the 1960s: the decline of the welfare state and the pre-eminence of new accountability-based standards, the move towards lifelong learning, globalisation and its consequences, the focus on local governances in the late 20 ^th century and the return of the state, the very subject of this seminar.

· How sociology of education had to reposition itself and report on these developments. It is not useful to go back to classics, namely the confrontation between Boudon’s and Bourdieu’s paradigms in the 1960s and 1970s. The symposium organised in Toulouse in 1983 by Jean-Michel Berthelot “Promoting assessment of the sociology of education” opened a new era characterised by the recognition of the variety of approaches and topics addressed. The committee “Education, Training, Socialisation” of the international association of French-speaking sociologists (AISLF) and the journal Éducation et Sociétés were established in its wake.

· The contribution of INRP to these developments. Sociology was not part of INRP’s founding project. Even worse, it was suspected of disenchanting the move towards the democratisation of education. For example, Louis Legrand, who supported the comprehensive lower secondary school policy from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, showed distrust. It took the authority of Viviane Isambert-Jamati and Walo Hutmacher at the scientific committee, of Antoine Prost and Goéry Delacôte as presidents of this committee, of Francine Dugast and Philippe Meirieu as directors of INRP and the support of union and social forces to include sociology within INRP. It was given a concrete turn when a symposium “Promoting new assessment of the sociology of education” was organised in 1993, a decade after Jean-Michel Berthelot’s symposium. Placing INRP at the heart of the academic world involved some internal changes. As of 1991, Francine Dugast moved in this direction and INRP was given a new status in 1993. However, this initiative was not supported by her successor. In the early 2000s relocation to Lyon without any scientific project broke collective initiatives. Amid disarray, the symposium “the sociology of education to the test of social changes” organised in Lyon in 2004 and supported by AISLF evidenced that INRP was still in a position to mobilise the scientific sector. This meeting deeply renewed issues insofar as it became aware of globalisation and as a result considered all the possible scientific consequences.

· Stanley Hilton, head of INRP’s international relations department, gave new impetus to international cooperation. International comparative works have always been enlightening but the new state of the world calls for going beyond methodological nationalisms. The institute is therefore requested to penetrate the think tanks that put forward international recommendations. It is only then, when policy issues and the networks behind them are identified that the study of their implementation in the field becomes fully meaningful. It is in this spirit that INRP got in touch with the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) which led to the organisation of a symposium on accountability policies in 2009. The newly-opened process bore fruits. The Network of Experts in the Social Sciences of Education (NESSE), which is now led by Roger Dale, was set up at INRP just as EUROPEP. This widened perspective now goes beyond Europe as a new agreement with East China Normal University (ECNU) is meant to strengthen the links of INRP with Shanghai. In the same vein, several scholars have engaged in a forthcoming network of educational sociology set up by Jenny Ozga and Martin Lawn within the European Educational Research Association (EERA).

All these elements have somehow contributed to the present symposium. The purpose is to address several issues that are all related to globalisation. The shift in the form of the educating state and the various “third ways” are at the very heart of the symposium. There will also be reflection on the repositioning of the sociology of education relative to the growing influence of expertise within international organisations.

Like the Phoenix of Arabia, a new institute will probably be born anew and stronger within the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon. It is vital for the institute to keep and enhance our historic role of exchange platform: place for the shift from field experiences to academic research, place for the confrontation, capitalisation and dissemination of research findings to policy makers and all interested social forces. INRP no longer has the monopoly over state orders. It now has to take a firm stand on the developing market. The Lyon-based Collegium and higher education research hub (PRES) are the opportunity for refounded INRP to develop at international level the concept-making enterprise necessary to think the new realities of the world of education and training.