Crise et grandeur de l’éducation publique: l’école (à la maison) et ses controverses durant la pandémie de COVID-19 en Suisse

Abstract

Cette communication explore les économies morales de l'enfance et de la jeunesse en Suisse au travers d'une cartographie des controverses qui ont accompagné les transformations de l'école pendant la pandémie de COVID-19 en Suisse. Basée sur l'analyse de documents officiels et d'articles publiés dans les médias, elle compare les grammaires morales des décisions prises dans deux cantons pendant les premiers six mois de la pandémie (mars-septembre 2020) au sujet des écoles primaires et secondaires (v. résumé en anglais pour plus de détails).

Crises are moments of uncertainty, where the social order, the meaning of reality and the value of beings vacillate, moments ripe with questions and opportunities for critique (Cordero, 2017). As such, they are doubly fertile for sociological enquiry. One the one hand, they make visible the conditions of possibility of a certain order, namely by observing the interventions undertaken to restore it or to build a new one (Latour, 2006). On the other hand, crises typically trigger countless controversies, compelling the actors to expose their moral and political justifications, while concurrently weakening previously taken-for-granted conventional norms (Boltanski, 2009 ; Boltanski & Thévenot, 1991). In this sense, the multiple crises (sanitary, social, economic,…) associated to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic are particularly revealing of the political logic of late capitalist societies and of the moral economies (Fassin, 2009, p. 1257) of contemporary childhoods, that is, of the production and circulation of values, norms, emotions and obligations associated to the young. Whilst children and young people’s physical health has been relatively spared by the pandemic, the measures taken to contain its spread have deeply affected their daily lives. Like adults, they have been called, directly or through their parents, to unite in (intergenerational) solidarity to fight the coronavirus and respect “barrier gestures”. In an unprecedented historical move, millions of children and young people have also been constrained, almost simultaneously, into homeschooling for several months, upsetting, despite teachers’ efforts to ensure learning at a distance, their right to education, and highlighting the huge inequalities existing between children and young people of different socioeconomic backgrounds. This paper aims to shed light on the moral economies of childhood and youth in Switzerland by mapping the transformations of schooling during the pandemic, as well as the associated controversies. Based on the analysis of official documents published by key stakeholders (e.g. cantonal governments, teacher training institutions, unions) and of media reports, as well as on ethnographic observations, it will compare the moral grammars of decisions targeting primary and secondary school pupils (respectively, 4-11 and 12-18 year-olds) in two cantons over a 6-month period (March 2020-September 2021). Switzerland is particularly well suited for such a comparative study, as each canton conducts its own public education policy. The paper will explore, in particular, how the association between a highly legitimate biopolitical logic (Foucault, 1976), dominant conceptions of childhood and youth and the evolving knowledge about children and young people’s role in the transmission of the virus translated into distinct moral judgements about the relevance of different forms of (home)schooling. It will also explore the effects of the pandemic on the legitimacy of public schooling and of the school form, leading, for instance, to reinstituting the teacher as the essential figure in the transmission of knowledge, to the prevalence of pedagogies of care and compassion, and to the displacement of the school form, namely in the shape of outdoor education.