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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The Democratization of Education in France : Controversy over a Topical Issue

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International audience; The last 100 years have seen an unbroken rise in the proportions attending school (between ages 14 and 25) in France - the median age for leaving the educational system is now over 20 years, compared with below 11 years in the mid-nineteenth century. Does this mean that the period has witnessed an uninterrupted "democratization of schooling" ? Marie DURU-BELLAT and Annie KIEFFER focus here on two aspects of the changing pattern of educational attainment. First, their analysis considers three successive stages of selection - access to the first-year of collège, which is the start of the French secondary cycle, then access to the first year of lycée, and lastly obtaining the baccalauréat. They show that while the numbers entering the secondary cycle have expanded greatly, the proportions of these pupils going on to higher levels have improved much less. Second, the authors stress the distinction between access to the different levels, which has increased for most social groups, and the pattern of inequalities between the groups, which show little change. The authors thus conclude for a "translation of inequalities", by which they mean a shift to higher levels of the inequalities previously observed at the lower levels.