Educating Citizens at School: Individualization and Depoliticization of Citizenship

This text analyzes the features and the figures of the legitimate citizen in the sphere of school, through both official guidelines and school staff’s conceptions and practices. Data from two qualitative fieldwork surveys in French schools are used. The analysis focuses on the political dimension of citizenship: the relationship between individuals and power and their agency in collective and political life. Overall, citizens’ participation is a secondary dimension in school citizenship education, which rather emphasizes the intellectual autonomy of the critical citizen. The school hardly offers tools enabling students to understand political life, its issues, its actors and its concrete processes. The avoidance of political issues that is observed in classrooms is related to a particular conception of school political neutrality, but still more to the objective of cohesion officially attributed to school and recognized by teachers as legitimate. In other respects, citizenship is increasingly intended to be translated into the school life itself, whose modes of organization must move closer to those of adult political democracy. The article shows the limitations of such an analogy between the school and political society and identifies several obstacles that hinder the implementation of this “democratic school”. Lastly, it highlights the gap between the emphasis on the figure of individual citizen in the school space and the relationship to groups entailed by the actual practice of citizenship.