The Historical Process of Development of Engineering Sciences as a School Discipline in France

This paper describes the historical process of development of engineering sciences as a school discipline and as an academic subject. It aims to understand the evolution of contents and their structuration, mainly, of the industrial technology for men and of the home economics for women, from the Liberation to today. It contributes to analyze the history of technology education in the basic school and its positioning in the curriculum. This historical and didactic research focuses on the prescribed curriculum, analyzing official texts about contents (practical tasks, functional analysis, graphic tools, modelling...), the training and the certification of teachers, equipment and administrative organization. It identifies the concordances between the emergence of engineering sciences within the university, their development within the tertiary and secondary schools and the development of technology education within the basic education. This contextualized sociological and political history reveals the movement of the deprofessionalization and the despecialization of the current courses, the opportunities to take into account of the sustainable development, the relegation of producing, the priorities for scientific approaches, the integration of mechanics, electronics, automatics, energetics and numerical tools.