D'une formation centrée sur un savoir disciplinaire à une formation centrée sur les problèmes économiques des agriculteurs

Economic training of farmers is currently dominated by the transmission of an academic knowledge : accounting and management ; this situation is due to historical, fiscal and institutional reasons. The necessary search for an enlargment of the field of this training must not hide the insufficiency of thinking about management itself. Farm management is traditionnally considered, according to the views of management advisers, as the set of methods leading to an economical and financial diagnosis of the farm. For the farmer however, management is firstly an action : decision making about objectives under constraints. Management training must therefore be also considered as a training to decision making. This remark, joined with scientific research on economic behaviour of farmers and on analysis of the farm in terms of systems, with pedagogic research and with future prospects of agriculture etc., leads to renewal of the thinking about both objectives and methods of this training. - If we want to increase the «strategic capability» of the farmer we have to emphasize economic analysis and decision making, tightly relating the farm, the family and the socio-economic environnment. - On a pedagogic viewpoint, we cannot be satisfied with transmitting a knowledge. Farmers have to acquire capabilities based on their own economic problems, on a better knowledge of their own economic behaviour and on their own experience of action. - At the institutional level, the training of trainers has to be reoriented and initial education and adult training should be more closely related.