By admin 
Unlike secularism and equal opportunities, compulsory schooling is not today the subject of a particularly intense conflict of interpretations. If the first, secularism, is the subject of a recurring quarrel about the meaning to be given to it and which brings together the supporters of a fundamentalist, secularist version of the secular principle and the partisans of a more liberal, open and tolerant understanding of this same principle and if the second, equality of opportunity, is claimed, at the same time, by a neoliberal discourse which assumes without flinching the representation of social (and school) life as an essentially competitive space within which the winners can enjoy their successes without complexes while the losers must assume, without possible recourse, their defeats, at least as long as the competition has been fair and by a republican discourse which seeks, on the other hand, to contain the devastating effects of this competitive representation while preserving the egalitarian requirement which this ideal of equality of opportunity carries, the last (compulsory schooling), on the other hand, is still relatively spared from the destabilization generated by these hermeneutic conflicts [1] .
However, the very principle of this obligation should, in time, enter in turn into this spiral of problematization and thus join, in their common weakening, the two other normative ingredients of the republican tradition in school matters. If equality of opportunity can be interpreted as the reformulation, within the school enterprise, of the requirement of equality contained in the recognition of the same right to basic education for all, and if the principle of secularism translates, for its part and in the same way, the requirement of neutrality constitutive of this same right, compulsory schooling can, for its part, be understood as the parallel translation of the requirement of unconditionality inherent in this same recognition. But what about the legitimacy of this translation today?
In the eyes of a modern, in fact, compulsory schooling naturally appears as the institutional translation of a right, the right to basic education for all: an initial, primary education, which was embodied, for us, in the republican school, free, secular and compulsory. “For all” here means that this right is both universal and unconditional. But how can an unconditional right give rise to the establishment of an obligation? A question that will appear all the more acute if we consider, moreover, that the promulgation of this right obeyed an explicitly emancipatory aim, the question then becoming: how can school be, at the same time, liberating and compulsory? Or again: how did we move from Condorcet’s minimalist formula: “That no one can complain of having been excluded”, to the maximalist republican formula: “That no one can complain of having been forced, since it is for his own good”?
In the first part, we will try to show why compulsory schooling has become problematic today by questioning, from a quick historical perspective, the meaning that it can still carry. More precisely, and by adopting the hypothesis that this obligation initially directly and indirectly satisfied a triple requirement (eradicating child labor, strengthening the normative power of the school as an institution devoted to the training of citizens, but also, and according to a less avowed project, that of the worker and, more precisely, that of the salaried worker), we will ask ourselves what is now the case with these three dimensions of compulsory schooling.
In a second step, we will consider the possibility of a re-establishment of the unconditional right to education, of which compulsory schooling will have been, in a particular historical moment, in a way that is both necessary and imperfect, the institutional translation. Necessary, insofar as the establishment of this obligation (in two stages, in France: in 1833, within the framework of the “Guizot moment”, with the obligation imposed on all municipalities of the national territory to open and maintain a primary school, and in 1882, with the “Ferry moment” and the promulgation of the obligation to educate or have one’s children educated as a law of the Republic) contributed to a decisive expansion of the movement of schooling in our societies, a movement that itself participated in the more general process of civilization described by N. Elias. But, imperfect in proportion to what the imposition of this obligation can preserve of archaic in the eyes of a modern for whom the idea of obligation is inseparable from the idea of contract (the contract alone can oblige). Even if the idea of pact, in the form of the republican pact was, then, mobilized to reinforce the consensual nature of the Republic in the process of establishment. But a pact is not exactly the same thing as a contract. We will show, in particular, that the idea of ”quasi-contract” developed by the solidarist theorists of the republican model and the logic of the intergenerational debt that it mobilizes have made it possible to think together this mixture of archaism and modernism. At the same time, we can question the perspectives opened up today by the attempts to reactivate this solidarist paradigm [2] thanks to which compulsory schooling could find a new and true legitimacy in such a way that its current weakening, of which the tendency towards its penalization is precisely the sign, is suspended. But at the risk, then, of renewing the initial ambiguities of the republican pact.