To Improve Education in Order to Break the Vicious Cycle of Inequality: An Urgent Investment

Abstract

The present article reflects on the role of the educational system in the (re) production of social inequalities, a phenomenon that has been the object of a large scientific production by the social sciences, in particular by the sociology of education. Our observation, as social professionals, of the interactions between teachers and students in a school context, leads us to recognize in situ the phenomenon of school elimination that Bourdieu [1] called “the excluded from the inside”. This observation allows us to verify how and how much the school institution can contribute to generate a rise of completely unrealistic expectations, in the precise measure in which it refuses to invest seriously in the learnings of the students that it certifies. We refer in particular to those students who are less equipped to appropriate the curricular knowledge that it conveys. This short reflection highlights some pedagogical practices dominant in the school that tend to reproduce the (unequal) order that marks the access to school certification. At the same time, it also points out ways of improving the modalities of teaching, according the theories about teaching through problems and competences [2, 3, 4, 5, 8].