L'enseignement des sciences, de Ferry à l'éveil.

Abstract

Teaching Science from Jules Ferry to the scientific awakening method. The “object lesson” was established as the paradigm for teaching science in France since school was made compulsory by Jules Ferry. By claiming to appeal to children’s observational abilities, it became the central figure of primary school culture and teaching methods, whose norms hardly evolved during 70 years (until 1957). Since the end of the 1960s, the awakening method completely changed this venerable model. This anti-positivist and anti-empiric method rejects didactical observation ; it advocates a frontal approach of the complexity of cognitive operations, as opposed to the old idea of a progression from the simple to the complex, and refuses the traditional intellectualism and partitioning of school disciplines in favour of modernist teaching ideas taking into account the totality of the development of the child. In this respect, the scientific awakening method is more the particular result of a general renovation of teaching methods, than a renewal of the didactics of science. But in a way it is by returning to the origins of the object lesson that the awakening method claims to go further : it aims to realise the old dream of the active student, which was already Jules Ferry’s dream, and even that of Victor Duruy. However the same institutional transformations of school which have given birth to the awakening method also play against it ; primary school has become a foundation course for secondary Education, reintroducing the disciplinary separations which the awakening method questioned. It is not certain therefore, as far as the teaching of science is concerned, that one should be satisfied with these transformations.