Search

The paper deals with the results of critical-theoretical analysis of the global context of the school expansion: general growth of educational structure of population, credentals' inflation, and growing importance of education in the process of allocation of the individuals on the job market, as the one of the major tendencies in European societies after World War II. Reality and pseudo-reality of equal opportunities have been evaluated on the different levels of; entrance into educational system, diversification of the schooling process, and societal valorization of 'diploma'. Concepts of segregation of democracy and cascade concurrency have been used in answering the question why the importance of ascribed ('heritaged') attributes have grown which consequently undermined the legitimation basis of modern democratic societies - equal opportunity for all.

Traditional American higher education system, that once was adequate for education of social elite, had to adapt, after the Second World War, to the new wave of students who would occupy middle level and relatively powerless jobs in growing corporate economy and public sector. The Community College Movement was an adequate response to the need for legitimating the new social stratification through school credentials, to the demands of minorities and lower classes youth for ever widening access to higher education, and to the demand for professionalization of some occupational groups aspiring to achieve higher social status. Through class based channeling and educational inflation, higher educational system contributes, in its own way, to preserve the existing patterns of social inequalities.

Surveys that E. Debarbieux conducted within l'Observatoire European de la violence scolaire showed that in great number of pupils attending French schools gradually developed a strong resentment toward that institution and, as time went by, that resentment turned into a real anti-scholar and anti-institutional culture. However, real roots of that culture are to be found in growing social-economic unequalities of french society so it shouldn't be surprising that school violence and scholar youth delinquency are spatialy concentrated in the so called 'établissements sensibles' (riskful schools) located in poor quarters at the outskirts of cities, that is, quarters that growingly assume characteristics of ghettos. Yet, in creating and spreading of certain types of school violence and youth delinquency in schools, accomplice is school organization itself which gives its contribution to accumulation of micro-violences. These micro-violences actually are the weft of everyday oppression, and reproduct, and what is more important, increase inequalities in a larger society, especially the social inequality of chances to become a victim.

The analysis of the authors belonging to the "Correspondence Theory" leaves little doubt that U.S educational expansion and school reform in 19. century was associated with the growing ascendancy of the capitalist mode of production. Discovered pattern comprehends accumulation in the dynamic, advanced sectors of the economy, the consequent integration of new workers into the wage labor system, the expansion of the urban working class and the reserve army, the emergence of political protest movements and the threat of social unrest, and, finally, the development of movements for educational expansion and reform. While the impetus for educational reform rarely came from impoverished disgruntled farmers or urban working class, the leadership of the movement was in the hands of a coalition of professionals and owners from the leading sectors of the economy who always succeeded in stamping its imprint on the form and direction of educational innovation.

Riots in French "banlieues" can be properly understood only within a context of the French economic and social history in the last few decades. "Trente glorieuses", the increase of the immigrant population, French "welfare state" and urban politics, the effects of the economic crisis of the 70`s, dismantling and marginalization of the working class environment, concentration of the unemployment and poverty in the "banlieues", segregation and ghettoization - these are the necessary elements of any sociological interpretation of the actual crisis. Between the "urban poverty" and the riots, several mediations have also an important impact: new security policy and police violence - the evolution of Welfare state towards the Penal state, new forms of racism and social exclusions, inefficiency of the "Republican model of integration", suburban youth sub-culture as an attempt of neutralizing the growing stigma etc. Persistent treating of a segment of citizenry as suspect, intrinsically prone to violence - as potential enemies, could prove to be, in the future, a self-fulfilling prophecy.