Official and Alternative Pedagogic Discourses

This chapter covers the analysis of the French official discourse on education as articulated in the so-called Academic Project 2017–2020, a 32-page document issued by the regional governing body on education called Académie de Paris. The analysis explores the main commonsense understanding of the role of education and its different actors in the official (French neoliberal) discourse. Further on, I analyze the local discourse in texts issued by the LAP school, namely their so-called ‘pedagogic project’, in French ‘Projet d’Etablissement 2014–2019’, which functions in fact as the local curriculum; a requirement to produce by the State. The analysis of these two texts will make possible the interpretation of how the school institution articulates its educational practices with regard to the expectations mediated in the Academic Project 2017–2020 on the macro-level of State institutions and outsiders in general. It will be demonstrated that the managerial approach to the ‘efficiency’ of education characteristic of a market-oriented pedagogical model is rejected by LAP. At the same time, some aspects are left unquestioned, such as the desirability of the reified notions of ‘competencies’ and ‘projects’.