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This article focuses on the ways in which foreign languages were made compulsory in the French education system and defended as practical knowledge by a new fraction of the bourgeoisie in the second half of the 19th century. It thereby highlights some of the historical conditions of possibility for the rise of a market culture within the education system, the ways it was promoted or imposed and the reasons underlying its success. Showing how this defence is firmly anchored in the historical debates on the educational forms necessary to encourage an enterprising spirit since the 18th century, the article sheds light on the mobilisation that preceded the introduction of such forms in the French classical lycées in 1902. It thus contributes to understanding how a useful discipline or school subject can emerge, revealing the links between curriculum transformations and the changes affecting the social space and the balance of power within the field of power.

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[Global history and national history from a French standpoint] In France just as anywhere else in Europe and beyond, national history and global history are often thought of and represented as being in opposition. Such opposition hinders any serious attempt at renewing teaching canons towards a transnational approach. Yet, in most of the best historical scholarship today the two approaches complement each other, regardless of the chosen standpoint. The article examines some recent works and research fields that have made substantial contribution to a new historical understanding of the modern world by intersecting national and global history. The article further outlines ways of introducing this same new approach into history teaching, in order to relinquish the blind spots both national and global history can create if assumed unproblematically.

French Republicanism prohibits the creation of American-style affirmative action based on racial and ethnic descent. Nevertheless, France has its own affirmative action programs based on socio-economic indicators in given geographical zones. Over the past ten years, there have also been experimental and informal efforts to diversify selective institutions of higher education. This article assesses, through ethnographic field work and in-depth interviews, one of these programs-the establishing of a classe préparatoire aux grandes écoles in a working-class and heavily immigrant suburb east of Paris. The article reveals that while local underprivileged students who attend the classe préparatoire are most unlikely to wind up in a grande école, they just the same receive essential instruction that readies them for university study. As members of the original teaching team leave and are replaced, however, the future of the prépa's mission is far from certain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

French school system has always taken the cinema's educational dimension into account . Nevertheless, the full integration of films in the cultural and educational activities of French pupils only dates back to the 1980s. Indeed, films are part of the syllabusas an optional course in the last three years of secondary school. Besides, from primary school onward, a whole system which enables pupils to become familiar with the cultural and artistic dimension of films has been set up thanks to the collaboration of the Ministries of Education and Culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The specificities of creativity as a cross-sectorial skill have been analysed thanks to a survey in psychology, sociology and educational sciences dealing with measure, development and long-term effects of creativity. The main results seem to explain why this competence could not be incorporated by the French educational system. First of all, the uncertainty of long-term effects linked with creativity and the “adequationnist” logic that shaped the educational organisation kept it away from the main objectives of the French educational system. Secondly, the assessment model prevailing into the French educational system is not well equipped to furnish an appropriate measure of creativity., Thirdly, many specificities of the educational system, such as the weakness of interactions between schools and other social spaces enhancing the development of creativity limit its development.