Réinterroger la relation entre école et mobilité sociale. Le cas des enfants d'agriculteurs et d'ouvriers dans l'Ouest

Till now, the relation between schooling and social mobility, a classical question in the sociology of education, has been approached through analyses of a structural sort, either by focusing on the functions that schools are supposed to fill or by adopting the timeless model of neoclassical economics. This approach does not examine all possible relations between schools and social mobility; nor does it see these relations in terms of a process. A study of the scholastic biographies of the children of farmers and workers in western France renews our conception of this relation. It shows that this relation mainly stems from a combination of quite heterogeneous elements, which we glimpse in these biographies.