Schools and Work: Technical and Vocational Education in France since the Third Republic (review)

Historians of modern France are typically familiar with the nineteenth-century educational landmarks from Napoleon I to the early Third Republic that shaped primary and secondary schooling until the 1960s. Less well known is the history of post-primary technical and vocational education, which traditionally has lacked the social prestige of the academic secondary schools (lycées) preparing students for the examination for the baccalauréat required to enter universities. Day’s well-researched and up-to-date survey thus provides a valuable introduction to an increasingly important educational sector. Although his primary focus is “intermediate” (that is, secondary-level) technical and vocational education, one chapter treats post-secondary institutions. The study also links curricular and administrative history to changes in government, the economy, and society. To help readers follow complex developmental threads, Day includes diagrams, tables, and a list of 45 common abbreviations for French educational terms.

By the 1890s the administration of technical and vocational education entailed rivalry between the Ministry of Public Instruction, whose primary education division housed the higher primary schools (écoles primaires supérieures, or EPS), and the Ministry of Commerce which oversaw the less numerous applied schools of commerce and industry (écoles pratiques de commerce et d’industrie, or EPCI). Whereas the latter had a strictly vocational mission and mostly instructed males (only 13 of 69 EPCI were for girls in 1910), the former combined a general education track that could lead to departmental normal schools for primary schoolteachers and vocational options that competed with the EPCI for students. In 1920 the education ministry took over the EPCI which, together with the EPS vocational sections, became part of a technical education division with its own central administration.

That the longstanding structural barriers between primary and secondary education helped perpetuate divisions among social classes is a familiar theme, and to this Day adds an account of how technical education’s champions sought to preserve its separate institutional identity. During the interwar decades reformers advocating the democratization of education favored creating an école unique, an intermediate school to be positioned between primary and secondary schools and intended to facilitate movement from primary to secondary schools at a time when compulsory primary schooling ended at the age of thirteen (raised to fourteen in 1936). Secondary school professors and their supporters opposed this reform, as did many teachers in both technical schools and higher primary schools, who feared losing a separate status. The Vichy regime partly broke the stalemate by turning the EPS into collèges, but the Fifth Republic, created in 1958, undertook the most basic restructuring, building upon the Fourth Republic’s expansion of post-primary schooling in traditional academic lycées, technical schools, and the apprenticeship centers planned in 1938 and extended by Vichy.

The largest part of Day’s survey deals with the Fifth Republic, under which distinctions increasingly developed between technical education and vocational education, the latter termed “professional” (professionnel) in France. Change occurred at all educational levels during the 1960s and 1970s. The length of primary schooling was reduced, the four-year intermediate school (collège) was created to help democratize public education, many new secondary schools were opened, and soaring university enrollments, plus student riots in 1968, prompted the first major reorganization of universities since 1896. In 1960 the education ministry’s technical division was abolished because the political left judged it an obstacle to democratizing and consolidating secondary education, the right “disliked its utilitarian approach,” and, most importantly, influential technocrats in the new government wanted different leadership of this sector to meet increased demand for new types of skilled personnel (p. 51). Administrative arrangements for technical education have since varied.

With the launching of the Common Market governmental and business leaders pushed for economic modernization to make France more competitive with other European countries and the United States. As secondary schooling expanded, both before and after the...