Responsibility in Education: Transformations, Ruptures and Contradictions

If education has always been connected with responsibility simply because the word educare by definition involves nourishing, raising, cultivating, the past few years have witnessed, both in Quebec and in Europe, a redefinition in various ways of the sharing of responsibilities among participants in the educational system. This text presents the principal areas concerned by this redefinition (school management, educators, learners) and briefly analyzes certain issues and tensions caused by it in terms of moral responsibility and the main meanings assigned to it in the scientific literature. Moreover, it introduces articles of this special issue that report research analyses and results which eloquently illustrate various contemporary dimensions of responsibility in education.