Abstract EN:

Studying the crisis of French secondary education during the 60's and the 70's may help to understand the unusual popular success of a set of social theories inspired by structural linguistics, usually referred to as " literary structuralism " and represented, for example, by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. The teaching of humanities and literature in secondary schools becomes really difficult after 1960 : the institutional changes of educational structures, the fact that technology has been introduced among the scholastic disciplines, the promotion of new cultural and educational models, the democratization of secondary schools, the difficulty in recruiting qualified teachers, and the growing influence of the mass media —because of all these tendencies, the internal ambiguities of the humanist tradition turn into problematic contradictions, and the question of how to define the aims and functions of general education becomes a crucial issue for teachers. Literary structuralism provides them with cognitive resources, arguments and notions, which are apt to help them to conciliate " revolutionnary " claims of modernity with the spirit of traditional academic exercises, like " dissertation " or " explication de texte ", so that they would be able to overcome what appears to be a profound crisis of legitimacy.