What “Makes Schooling”

The recent Covid-19 pandemic has both revived and tested the ideologies of unschooling, or the deinstitutionalization of school. It is clear to see that the weakening of the role of schooling has had the effect of increasing educational inequalities and appears to be particularly damaging to students from disadvantaged backgrounds, while families most familiar with the school world have been found to be most able to support their children. These observations should prompt us to rethink the specificity of school as an institution and as a particular form or grammar and to reconsider the anthropological and structural links between school, literacy and study work, the type of knowledge that makes it necessary, and the risk of confusing, on the one hand, the essential democratization of our educational systems and the criticism of their unequal and bureaucratic modes of operation and, on the other, their deinstitutionalization, whether visible or hidden.