Abstract EN:

The service of "specialised teaching methods" created to welcome and take in charge intellectually retarded children has strongly progressed with the so-called "specialised forms" created to be part of renewal french school system which began as early as 1959. The present work which situates these "specialised teaching methods" in the whole scheme of education, will show how this pedagogical network will re-assume and "recuperate" the pupils which the normal educational system would not comprehend and accept because of their inadequate performances compared to the normal requirements at the different levels of the ordinary cursus. This cursus becomes more and more normalised by the compulsory itinerary through the first and second form. The vast number of orientations in the "specialised sections" and the mostly popular social origin of the pupils raise many problems as to the real nature of the alleged deficiences. Compared to the performances in the high schools, are not the lower results in "specialised sections" a revealing factor of the social and familial ingredients of the working classes whose adaptation to the secondary school system is a kind of break with their own traditional vision of school? are we not then to contemplate a completely different approach by the working-class families in their search for efficient educational patterns in conformity with their own social network and their own capacity for intellectual mobilisation (though modulated) within their own symbolical mastery of time?