Sociology French education has known a strong development since the 1980s. It is enriched with a hand, the contribution of the work of foreign, and especially anglo-saxons, and the other part of the development of science education. This book, which compiles some of the articles of Jean-Claude Forquin, written since 1983, providing a better understanding of a part of the evolution of the sociology of education, turning around the concept of curriculum. The interest is thus to bring together a series of articles of the French specialist of the sociology of the curriculum, in order to enrich our knowledge of an approach, more often indistinctly known (particularly among the teachers placed by the UNIVERSITY).
If the notion of curriculum was long ignored by the French research in education, his employment since a score of year is often based on the desire to circumscribe an area large and diverse. We may think that “novelty” of this approach exotic because anglo-saxon ( !) could lead to an escalation in its use. As if the (too) long ignorance of this approach gave him today a value-added intellectual non-debatable. Jean-Claude Forquin describes the place of the sociology as “marginality, effective and centrality potential,” a paradox that should resolve his work. The book focuses in a first part on the definition of the sociology of the curriculum, in its broadest sense strict. The second part extends reflection on the curriculum, by crossing this notion with the question of the school culture and disciplinary content.