Abstract EN:

For more than a century, on the fringe of the mainstream educational system, unconventional secondary schools resorting to innovative, active and cooperative educational methods have developed. They have so far received little scientific attention. The present doctoral thesis aims at assessing how they have been running both in the private and the state sectors since 1945, on the basis of an examination of their history, successes and failures. From a methodological point of view, its pluridisciplinary approach combines the methods used in history (documental investigations, archival analysis, oral history), sociology (long-term observations, non-directive interviews), or group psychology (myth and heroic idealisation analysis). The study shows that the innovative educational methods used in such collèges and lycées are based on an unconventional organization of time and space and the individualization of career paths within the school. These schools help pupils who failed in mainstream education ; they reduce the violence exerted by the school as an institution as well as the effects of such a violence (antisocial behaviour, truancy, academic failure, dropping out etc. ) However, complex cumulative processes, and more particularly the discrepancy between hard working conditions and idealized representation of unconventional schooling, have meant that a significant number of teaching staff have faced difficulties on the interpersonal level. Institutions are partly accountable for such difficulties because they place innovators in an ambigous situation. The schools under scrutiny differ widely from one another. Not all of them make the same choices and their results vary a lot. They adopt optimising or restrictive strategies ("levers" or "curbs") : the first category of levers or curbs is base on the history, the context and the attitude of the government, the second category depends on the ability of the staff to offer a coherent education. The analysis of the collected data revealed four different ways of organizing educational practices within a specific school : self fulfilment schools ("collège épanouissement"), pupil-centred high schools ("lycées centré sur l'élève"), non-directive scools ("école non-directive") and finally institutionalised schools ("école institutionnalisée"). Each form of organization follows different principles and obtains different results. The third category depends on the ability of the school to manage interpersonal relations.