9 - Everyday life at school

Summary

Children in Lavialle must adjust to new rules, meanings, behavioral codes, and symbols of authority and power when they enter school. At home, they learn to be members of families. At school, they learn how to be both French and Laviallois – and begin to form a view of themselves in relation to people outside of the local region. Schooling has existed in Lavialle for over a century and, although the Laviallois do not wholly identify with the values of the school, it would be misleading to see home and school in purely antithetical terms. They are best seen in relation to each other. As Hope Leichter has emphasized, “it is not sufficient merely to look at the family's values as compared to the school's values at a given moment in time. One might rather look at the way in which communication between family and school serves to modify each” (1979:21).

Lavialle's school, like most schools, tacitly undermines local cultural meanings and works to reproduce forms of social stratification. Its teachers reinforce the chasm between urban middle-class life and rural life in Lavialle. Through subtle and not-so-subtle ways, they criticize Lavialle families and their mode of life, justifying their low status. At the same time, however, the families and children of Lavialle have developed modes of resisting these messages. The pupils in Lavialle's primary school undermine the “symbolic violence” (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990) of the school through active strategies of peer group solidarity and passive strategies of resistance to teachers.