Is school overwhelming? Author Yuna Visentin deconstructs the egalitarian image of the educational institution

Associate professor of literature, normal student, mother, it is from all the components of her identity that Yuna Visentin wanted to write Another school is possible!, published by Leduc last August. She decrypts how the institution can and should revise its copy in the fight against inequality and discrimination.

But far from formulating only criticisms, it also aims to understand the origin of these methods and tends to find solutions for rethink a more respectful and emancipatory education.

A school that “takes inequalities out of the classroom”

To miss. National Education is a showcase of republican principles but in ” Another school is possible ! you point out a strong contradiction: it reproduces oppressive patterns. Where does this observation come from?

Yuna Visentin. There is a whole discourse that presents the school as a place for learning critical thinking, emancipation; but this discourse collides with the reality of the schoolto the sexist, racist, classist, validist discrimination reproduced by the institution, even legitimized by it.

At school the idea is conveyed that the educational staff should be neutral, but also that students should be sensitized to this neutrality, helped to get out of their different identities, their respective histories, their social situations, to “elevate” them towards a neutrality presented as an ideal to be achieved. As the anti-oppressive pedagogues have already pointed out – I am thinking in particular of Célestin Freinet, Paulo Freire, but also of the work of the bells – neutrality is a principle that serves to take inequalities out of the classroom, and thus to make them invisible. However, inequalities, be they of gender, “race”, class, etc. remain in force, even if not mentioned.

To understand this better, I think we need to remember the history of the school, of which we are ultimately told very little. National Education has never been an emancipatory institution for minorities. Let’s take the case of Jules Ferry, to whom we owe the laws for the establishment of a public, free, secular and compulsory school at the end of the nineteenth century, of course, it is not a question of going back on the need for a free school.

Jules Ferry was a staunch supporter of colonization, he also played a role in the repression of the Commune and saw school as a means to sweeten the spirit of the working class. It should be remembered that the school established at the end of the 19th century, and that until the 1960s, was a same-sex school, which assigns children according to a binary and hierarchical conception of the genre.

All this to say that there is a contradiction between the “showcase” of the school and its history, its real practices. Until we face the oppressive constructions of the educational institution head on, we cannot have a truly emancipating school.

There is a discourse that presents the school above all as a place for learning common knowledge, mathematics, spelling, etc., and that these stories of awareness of respect for differences must not be a priority. What to answer to this?

For me, this should be the goal of the school: to raise awareness of social relations together to increase our power of action and revolt, and to give us the confidence to change the world. And we can’t say this is a discount program.

I think that this discourse, as well as the one about the alleged drop in level, often serves a reactionary ideology that is easy enough to deconstruct. Take the example of spelling. In French is ours! Small manual of linguistic emancipation, the researchers Maria Candea and Laélia Véron reveal the idea that the French language is “in danger”, showing that it has always evolved, that spelling and grammar have only recently become more rigid, that the French hypercomplex spelling is very often arbitrary and not etymological … In other words, the French language has never been fixed, that it has a past and a future to build together, and that its strength derives from its malleability and its ability to renew itself. This is why the protectionist discourse on language, the obsession with the level that “drops” at school, the importance attributed to guilt, serve a protectionist logic that makes spelling an instrument of social distinction.

For me we should aim for demanding cultures, yes, but emancipatory. Cultures that do not serve to justify social hierarchies, that do not produce linguistic insecurity, that do not aim to adapt students to the social order, to employability, to business.

Why did you write a first-person essay?

It was totally inherent in the design of the book, which is also one of the reasons why I wrote it. I wanted get out of the teacher’s posture, out of the neutrality that we can show to students. The book begins with the story of a class debate on gender stereotypes which was a real pedagogical fiasco and a difficult time, but which allowed me to see how much we talk about our own socialization.

We all embody social attitudes, social roles, within complex dynamics, within which we can be more or less privileged or discriminated against. And within these dynamics no one is neutral: neither those who are discriminated against, nor those who are privileged. In a gender debate, a cisgender man is no more neutral than a trans woman, a non-binary person, or a cisgender woman.

On the issue of racism, it was also important for me to talk about what is called “white privilege”, to highlight the racist and white norm to see that, within a racist society, we are all riddled with racism. And as long as these inequalities remain invisible in school, they will be reproduced.

You address precisely the theme of anti-racism and anti-sexism by connecting them, why?

Linking the anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles was for me one of the greatest challenges of the book… precisely because I have the impression that the school does not. The struggle for equality between girls and boys is made visible within the educational institution, it is found in the common knowledge base, there are referents for gender equality in college… It is called. For racism it is completely different. Talking about systemic racism at school is very difficult. But there is school racism, which is expressed in daily discrimination, in the reduction of the possibilities for non-white young people, in the segregation of schools.

By crossing racial, gender and class discrimination, we can also highlight the specific oppressions suffered by women perceived as Muslims in school, the gender and racial orientation of non-white youth. And it also reminds us that discrimination, especially at school, is part of a material, economic, distributive dynamics of work, and therefore also of exploitation.

Finally, we also realize how insufficient the goal of gender equality is: not only does it remain dependent on a very binary vision, which makes LGBT + issues invisible, but it prevents us from questioning the overlaps between capitalism, sexism and racism. .

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the critique of meritocracy, why is this aspect so complex?

Sociologist Annabelle Alouch talks about it very well: the myth of meritocracy not only structures the school, but society as a whole. It is also an extremely vague concept: what does it mean to tell someone “you deserve it”? What idea of ​​”work” do we put behind it? What is highlighted? Which culture? What effort?

If merit, and not social class, has made it possible to organize access to knowledge and work, why are school and society so unequal? In reality there are a thousand different ways of working, a thousand “cultures”, but only some are rewarded and considered “deserved”. And the most complex thing is that all of this remains implicit.

As a teacher, how do you discuss these issues with your peers?

There is a real discouragement of many teachers about these questions. By promoting the book, I realized in a concrete way how many teachers suffer from working in an oppressive system that continues to close their room for maneuver.

Faced with this, what seems essential to me is to think about collective solutions and struggles, inside and outside the institution. What I want to emphasize with this book is that we will not save ourselves with individual questions, we need real collective transformations.

Photo credit: (c) Ayla Saura