L'exclusion sociale commence a l'ecole

Abstract

This article sets out to reveal and analyse one element of a latent mechanism, namely the marginalisation and social exclusion within schools of pupils who obtain bad school results. Under the pressure of the ideology of democratisation and equalisation of opportunities, schools have the tendency to make fewer demands in order to allow students to stay longer at school. This has not, however, resolved the problem: pupils do stay on at school. but they are subjected to processes of exclusion within it. Following up on this observation, we pose the following questions: what are the social relations between these students and those who achieve and are successful at school?What factor or factors determine these relations? Are these relations marked by integration or by rejection in the microenvironment that constitutes the school? It is the latter point which refers to the hypotheses of our article. Our empirical research on this subject, which involved a sample of 301 students in their last year of primary schooling, confirmed our hypotheses that the relations of attraction and exclusion are correlated to the school results obtained by pupils; which themselves are dependent on the social origins of students.