Resumen de Éducation des corps et disciplinarisation: le processus d’intégration des sports dans l’éducation scolaire française (1918–années 1990)

Dioriane Gomet, Michaël Attali

• English

  While sport was recognised as having educational virtues as early as the late nineteenth century in England, the situation in France was quite different. Considered to be both futile and dangerous, this social practice only featured anecdotally in manuals and official instructions directing physical education at school until 1967. The relationship with sport raises deep questions concerning the body’s place in education. More precisely, it emphasises bodily expectations, as well as the usefulness of examining them. The sporting body itself was not without significance. How, then, should resistance to the integration of sport be apprehended? Over and beyond political contexts, what were the reasons contributing to this tardy acknowledgement? In order to answer these questions, this study explores an avenue as yet unexplored. It undertakes to compare the discourse and knowledge production of sports advocates with the prominent features of the disciplinary power that tends to characterise all institutions. The corpus supporting the analysis includes publications dealing with sport (37 books and 160 articles) with a view to understanding the ideological and societal frames of the activity, together with education treaties and professional teaching reviews to comprehend relationships with sport as the latter’s importance continued to grow throughout the twentieth century. This contribution shows how the integration of sport as a unique medium for teaching physical education in the French education system depended on the degree of its conceptualisation and implied inevitable bodily control. For while sport may be associated with freedom and emancipation, making it educational meant controlling it and practising it moderately. Indeed, sport differs as a teaching element from the rest and is polarised by the values it conveys: excellence, performance, surpassing oneself and hierarchisation, which require dealing with it methodologically. Method was only truly established when work focusing on sport gave it a complete and unquestionable disciplinary foundation. During the first phase extending from the end of the First World War to the reconstruction, those in favour of education through sport developed their knowledge of sports techniques. In so doing, they highlighted the potentially normed, efficient, profitable and organised character of the sporting gesture. Moreover they advocated model-based pedagogy, according to which it was easy to compare instructors to true behaviour technicians. The body as a machine remained significant, although it was movement that was encouraged. In spite of the progress made, sport failed to make its way into schools, except during the Vichy period (1940–1944) to better control the masses. During the 1950s and 1960s, those promoting the teaching of sports-based physical education continued their research into sports techniques while, at the same time, widening their scope of investigation. Sports exercises became the nodal point of their reflection and resulting publications offered series of tasks that were described with great precision, and concurrently repetitive, graded in difficulty and organised over the long term. They presented an alternative model of bodily education. The latter’s sycophants engaged in work concerning, more particularly, assessment of the sporting body and offered tools for hierarchising performances. A number of experts focused on the notion of tactics, and the result of their reflection made it possible to link sport to a method for rationally organising individuals’ strength under a central command. Their innovations endowed sport with a sufficiently solid foundation for its integration, and it became the sole medium for teaching physical education at school as from 1967. However, the question of rational distribution of pupils and bodily control based on defined criteria was not addressed, and long-term organisation of learning was lacking. These were the two issues theoreticians undertook to address in the 1970s and 1980s. With a view to meeting the requirements of a supervisory body, they created levels within each sport, organised learning according to clear and detailed objectives and worked on drawing up criteria-based assessment. Over a period lasting less than 20 years, they provided the missing elements for defining a true disciplinary method. Effective acknowledgement of sport as a rich and pertinent medium for physical education at school was fully achieved with the publication of physical education and sport programmes in the mid-1990s.

• français

  Si le sport est reconnu pour ses vertus éducatives dès la fin du XIXème siècle en Angleterre, il en est tout autrement en France. Le rapport à son égard interroge la place du corps en éducation. Il met en évidence les fonctions attachées au corps autant que l’utilité à s’y intéresser. Toutefois le corps sportif n’est pas neutre. Comment comprendre les résistances à son intégration? Quelles sont, au-delà des contextes politiques, les raisons ayant concouru à cette reconnaissance tardive? Pour répondre à ces interrogations, cette étude entreprend de comparer les discours et les productions de connaissances des défenseurs du sport avec les traits saillants du pouvoir disciplinaire qui tend à caractériser toute institution. De 1918 à 1945, les pédagogues travaillent sur l’identification des techniques sportives, les transformant en actes au sens foucaldien du terme. La pédagogie qu’ils préconisent en fait de véritables techniciens du comportement. Durant les années 1950 et 1960, les exercices sont au cœur des réflexions. Leurs propositions acquièrent les attributs d’une pédagogie analytique. Ils développent des connaissances permettant de proposer des examens et de hiérarchiser les prestations. Dans les années 1970 et 1980 enfin, les théoriciens élaborent des grilles de niveaux, véritables quadrillages des corps rendant possible le fait de prescrire à chacun les exercices qui lui conviennent. Ils organisent les apprentissages sur le long terme à partir d’objectifs clairs, répondant en cela à la logique du temps disciplinaire.