Lire au collège et au lycée :

Abstract

Young readers : from blind faith to faithless practice. The longer children go to school, the less they read. The more they are forced to read the classics, the more they prefer Stephen King. Whatever indicator you choose, the decline is clear and no category of pupil is exempt : boys or girls, punctual or tardy, white-collar or blue-collar. Such reluctance to read has no simple explanation. The schools are not the only reason. Yet the fact remains that the way French is taught in the French lycées (high schools) also contributes to this personal rejection of bookreading. The transition from college (middle school) to lycée entails a profound change in reading standards, something that destabilizes most of the students thus obliged to switch from one level to the other. The first level, which we will call «ordinary», is that which is spontaneously adopted by young readers for both school-work and their own purposes. The second, « literary » level, is imposed in high school, where it becomes the legitimate norm. The attitudes and the dispositions towards the principle of reading which were encouraged in middle-school are suddenly disqualified in high school by the imposition of new norms implying that the students undertake a mental conversion for which many of today's high school students are unprepared. The concept of ordinary reading, already used by Robert Darnton, encompasses the space of all reading which explicitly takes the text as an instrument to ends that are external to it. The adjective « ordinary » here means that the book and the uses to which it is put are entirely anchored in immediate, everyday concerns (entertainment, documentation...) and vested with the personal interests of adolescents busy constructing their own identity. The concept of « literary reading » broadly includes ail ways of reading - from esthetic contemplation to structural analysis, by way of reading by literary reference - which make the text (in its meaning, forms, association with an author, or simply in its own value) the only interest and the goal of reading, which thereby becomes an activity that is its own end. The object of this article is to analyse the way these two reading modes are articulated with two separate levels of the school System : collège and lycée, and to analyse the effects this has on the ways young people read.