L’émergence de l’allophonie comme construction d’une politique éducative

Le traitement scolaire des enfants migrants en France

Abstract

Based on survey data (monographies and interviews collected in 8 schools), this article draws an analysis of the construction of a category of educational policy focused on the linguistic prism. This paper shows what the category of allophone produces as a school categorization and filtering institutional mechanism which consists in dissociating migrant students from each other, with reference to an implicit norm related to the “Francophonie”. While educational policies claim to promote accessibility, “allophonie” labels students and ranks them in its “total” and “temperate” form. Such dynamics endorse a form of school selection by practicing an aggiornamento of the rhetoric according to which certain children would be “savable” by the school, while others would not be it. The designation of “allophone” can feed multiple forms of minority between students as well as between migrant students and adults in charge of them in schools.