Daniel Passo Monteiro
Sociologist and member of the University of Geneva’s Physical education Team team
Posted on May 06, 2025 at 6:04 pm. / Modified on May 06, 2025 at 6:05 pm.
4 min. reading
To choose is to say that a whole part of the world does not concern us. It is therefore, in a way, to deprive yourself. It follows that the mechanisms of a teaching system are characterized as much by the objects that they select as by those which they exclude. The school field, in the sense that Pierre Bourdieu understands it, is therefore not socially neutral. According to this socio-logic, the absence of football as a discipline to be taught is revealing. Indeed, if the world of school education has its own logic and operates as a filter to perceive social reality, we can rightly wonder about the nature of this filter.
It turns out that the historical process of legitimizing school disciplines attests that the school has always more or less retained those which came from the top of the social structure to the detriment of others. On this point, by situating ourselves to a lower degree of abstraction, note that two conditions must be met so that the school selects a discipline: on the one hand, it must be intellectually attractive; On the other hand, the possibilities of its didactization must be fulfilled so that the institution can transmit and, in doing so, accomplish its mission. It will therefore have been understood, so that a discipline enters school, it must at least comply with these two eligibility criteria. Otherwise, it does not enter.
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