L'enseignement agricole et la domination symbolique de la paysannerie

In: Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, Volume 1, Issue 1, p. 75-97

Abstract

The teaching of agriculture and the symbolic domination of the peasantry
An instrument of action over the peasants, the teaching of agriculture could constitute for different fractions of the dominant class a means of maintaining their own definitions of the peasantry. Thus the rural primary school, which took the place of formal agricultural learning for most of the peasants, contributed at the end of the 19th century to transforming the peasantry by opposing the "enlightened farmer" to the "backward peasant". The teaching of agriculture could equally be taken as an attempt to resolve indirectly, through the interposed peasantry, the urban "social question". The idealized image of bucolic and peasant virtues, which the intellectuals and artists produced and which the school fed back to the peasants, was formed in the 19th century from the denunciation of the city's miseries : it was a euphemized expression of the fear engendered by the "worker peril". By producing a corps of professionals from the framework of the peasantry, the teaching of agriculture could have the effect of installing a new type of relationship of domination between the peasantry and the dominating class.