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JOURNAL OF YOUTH RESEARCHES
Education for Citizenship and Youth in France
consciousness. From this point of view, citizenship can be seen as the mechanism that
combines the individual and the collective in the most rational way.
In the context of individualism and citizenship, republican individualism can be seen
as a solution invented by secular moralists to solve the tension of citizenship between
the interests of individuals and the political society defended by citizenship and ethics
school book. (Déloye, 1994: 33).
Emile Durkheim has an important place in the concept of morality, education and citi-
zenship in the context of state-individual relations. Durkheim invites educators to teach
social and adaptive individualism based on the interaction of the person and the group,
not the individualism that guarantees human rights based on the individual. Durkheim
(1925), a moral education writer, supported that public schools are not satisfied with an
ethic based on one’s nature, but a moral education based on the historical and social
nature of morality is necessary.
Education is the founding element of the French citizenship, and school is the instru-
ment. When the Third Republic (1870-1940) established a free and compulsory primary
school, under the authority of the State, this mission of training the citizen was the
central objective. The school territory used in symbolic sense is defined by a form of
distance with regard to the lifestyle of its surrounding territory (Bier et al., 2010: 17-19).
When we say school territory, we refer to two things: the space materially occupied by
the school, which is related to its geographical, urban, periurban or rural, economic
and social environment; and its functional space, a territory conceptualized by its edu-
cational function (Garnier, 2014). Therefore, the school is defined as a functional space
both in terms of environmental (in this respect Pierre Bourdieu’s (1966) contribution to
sociology of education which established that the connections between space and
education are important), as well as the tasks it performs in relation to the power of
individual-state relations. This functionality is becoming even more important in the
context of state who supports active citizenship projects.
Contents of the Education for Citizenship
In the foundation of the citizenship education, four features seem remarkable. First of
all, the civic education avoids consideration of politics. Then, we are far from learning
the critical esprit and the debate; we are in a normative model. Moreover, it is above
teaching, an intellectual and sensitive learning (one mobilizes the emotion, the myths).
Finally, it concerns only the pupils of the popular classes (Bier, 2014: 12). It is during
the Liberation that “civic education” was introduced in the whole education system;
