Abstract EN:

This thesis aims to contribute to a better understanding of how the meaning of school experience constructs and develops oneself, inside the dialectic relation between activity and subjectivity. We define meaning as an interface between the objective and the subjective side of school experience. A socio-historical analysis of the evolution of school realities in contemporary french society, seeks to enligthen how the social contradictions meet and exacerbate the personal and family contradictions. Then, we undertake an analysis of thorough clinical interviews of lower-classes adolescents who are being successfull in school (and whose success is statistically abnormal), or whose, on the contrary, results and behaviour reveal important difficulties. The analysis of these interviews shows that school success occurs : on the one hand, when school knowledges are seen as owning an intrinsic value, and when school activities are identified as cognitive activities which require work from the subject himself ; on the other hand, when it is possible for the subject to assume the dialectic between identity and alterity in his subjective transformation and in the social positions and identifications mobility, which school success both requires and means. On the contrary, school difficulties occur when the nature of learning activities is not correctly identified : that is, either because school experience, school knowledges and the transformations it implies, being caught in subjective conflicts, mean for the subject that he cette these se propose de contribuer a mieux comprendre comment le sens de l'experience scolaire se forme et se developpe au coeur des rapports dialectiques d'unite et de discordance entre activite et subjectivite. Le sens est ici defini comme l'interface, le rapport entre le versant objectif de l'experience scolaire et son versant subjectif. Une analyse socio-historique de l'evolution des enjeux scolaires dans la societe francaise contemporaine, s'efforce de mettre a jour les contradictions sociales a l'epreuve desquelles s'exacerbent les contradictions propres aux histoires singulieres et familiales. La these porte ensuite sur l'analyse d'entretiens cliniques approfondis avec des adolescents d'origine populaire connaissant une reussite scolaire