Street Culture and Social Control in Different Types of High Schools in Working-Class and Immigrant Neighborhoods in France

Youth Culture in French Housing Projects

In housing project neighborhoods in France, people under the age of 25 often represent more than half the population. These teenagers attend the same schools. They spend most of their free time together in public places. They stay in the building entrances, hang around in small groups, play street soccer or bowl, write or draw on the walls, listen to funk or rap music, and sometimes steal, either in stores or more rarely by assaulting adults or teenagers. A very small fraction participates in the illegal sale of cannabis, which is controlled by a few criminal gangs. Although not prevalent, drug dealing is clearly visible at night on several street corners that are well known to the residents of public housing. Some of these dealers hold guns, but they seldom use them (Lepoutre 1997; Mauger 2009). During the two years that I stayed in La Cité des Quatre Mille, I never heard a single gunshot. When a young person is shot, the newspapers put it in the headlines. Except among hunters in the countryside, guns are rarely kept or used because of very restrictive gun legislation. In fact, the rate of death from guns in France is about one-tenth of that in the United States.

The sense of neighborhood identity is remarkable among young people in the projects. It does not look like rooted identity of the kind that exists in the countryside, because in this urban area many families move in and out every year. Rather, it is based on people’s common life experiences and social conditions during childhood and youth. Teenagers develop a strong, positive identification with their housing estate. Once, when we were travelling in Spain by bus with a Spanish language teacher and two classes of students, we stopped at a gas station. As students got off the bus, a bag fell down on the asphalt, shattering the plaster souvenir inside. Immediately the students took the broken pieces and, using them as drawing chalk, covered hundreds of square meters of the gas station’s pavement with improvised graffiti that humorously glorified their public housing: “Long live the Quatre Mille”; “Les Quatre Mille, the best project in the 93rd district”; “We are the Quatre Mille dudes.”

Language is a major feature of street culture. The dialect of these teenagers mainly comes from French slang, immigrants’ words, and the “reverse” method, which consists of saying “reunoi” for noir, “keubla” for black, or “meuf” for “femme,” and so on. Linguists and sociolinguists have compiled several dictionaries of this dialect. Some of this language has spread into other social classes (Fagyal 2010; Goudaillier 2001; Seguin and Teillard 1996).

Street Eloquence

In the youth culture of the cités, verbal skill is crucial in interactions, and the personal value of an individual is partly measured by his or her capacity to “perform” with language. You need to master the glossary, particularly obscene words. You need to be strong in diction and in the rate and volume of speech, and of course to be adept in the art of storytelling. Those who speak too slowly are never listened to. Shy people cannot find a place for themselves in a group of peers. Indeed, they are excluded from street culture, and teenagers often call a shy person an “excluded.” For example, Ousmane commented about a girl in his class: “Look how she speaks! She is all gooey! She looks all melted!” Other students nicknamed her “Fazia the junkie” (Lepoutre 1997).

Street eloquence is enforced in verbal fights in which two teenagers exchange jibes: offensive jokes and humorous or ritual insults. These events usually take place in public, with a group of peers. This collective game is widespread between the ages of 10 and 16, when youth are in middle school. Direct jibes have to do, above all, with physical appearance. Naouel, who had a prominent forehead with acne, was called “windscreen head,” “calculator head,” “popper buttons,” or “press steels”; she was also nicknamed “Front National,” because in French the same word is used for forehead and front and the National Front is an extreme right, anti-immigrant party. Medhi Kabacou, who had prominent eyes, was dubbed “frogeyes,” “telescope,” and “cyclops.” Gloria, who had a prominent nose, was called “Pinocchio,” “chain clippers,” and “pneumatic drill.” This kind of jibe may also be written or drawn on the blackboard, on papers, or even on walls at school.

Indirect jibes target family members, especially mothers. Unlike direct jibes, they can become caricatures. Figures and images are ludicrous, grotesque, coarse, and even obscene: “Your mother has convertible lips.” “Your mother has a wooden ass.” “Your mother has three tits.” “Your mother has a rusty pussy.” “Your mother is so ugly that when she jumped from the 17th floor the ground ran away.” “Your mother has iron panties with size sixteen screw locks.” Jibes about mothers are often scatological or sexual: “Your mother has two dicks in her eyes, it looks like a pair of binoculars.” “Your mother, when she goes to the toilet, she needs a life buoy.” “Your mother has her naked body in the encyclopedia.” “Do you know why horses run so fast in horse races? Because your mother is waiting at the finish.” “Do you know why there was fog on the city yesterday? Because your mother’s pussy was on fire.”

This practice has to be understood as an interactional exchange. The game is both conflictual and competitive. The goal, and sometimes the obsession, is to get one up on someone. But the competition is for fun. It gives pleasure to participants as well as to spectators. The person addressed has to respond quickly with another jibe, if possible a better one. The antagonists’ peers evaluate each jibe by laughing or with interjections like “Haan” “Too strong!” or “Powerful!” Disapproval is conveyed by “not funny!” or “two cents and a half jibe!”

Exchanges are not always equal, and they do not always take place at the same time or place. They can involve students in a single class throughout the school year, as was the case in one class that I often observed. Alternatively, students may constantly address jibes to a targeted victim. That was the case with Salem, a teenager who had thick black hair and heavy eyebrows. They called him “half-brow,” “helmet hair,” “mountain goat,” and “Elvis the big tuft” (for these teenagers, Elvis Presley was the symbol for nightmare hair). They also said: “Salem, he can hide his pen in his hair”; “Salem, he offered his hair to science”; “One minute of silence, Salem has just lost one hair”; “Salem, with his hair, he can receive Egyptian TV.”

Jallel, who had a rather big nose, was routinely mocked by his classmates, both in verbal form and by their drawing exaggerated pictures of his nose (see Figures 2a, b, and c). But Jallel responded by hitting those who threw jibes at him. Although he did not injure them, he hit them hard enough so that they would hesitate to make a jibe at him again. Other students were constantly seeking new ways to make fun of his nose while pretending not to do so until Jallel officially prohibited all these veiled attempts and swore he would punish anyone who kept on trying. They made little piggy noises. Then they drew two circles on the blackboard symbolizing Jallel’s nostrils. Next they spoke about noses in general. Finally, they used words that contained the forbidden syllable for nose, which they emphasized. In English, it would be a word such as “dinosaur.” In French, nose is “nez,” and the syllable né is quite common. They said: “Jallel, tu as passé une bonne journée”; “Jallel, comment ça va, cette année”; and so on.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2

Drawings about Jallel’s Nose

In this street culture, speech is used as a weapon, to symbolically attack or to manipulate others—peers and adults. Teenagers use the rhetoric of offense and insults. Boys as well as girls gossip. Some master the art of lying and are admired for that skill by their peers.

Physical Violence, Vengeance, and Honor

Exchanges of violence are another important aspect of street culture in the life of these teenagers. Boys are usually involved, but girls also participate. To become a member of the group, everyone must demonstrate his or her ability to fight at least once. Consciousness of group membership and collective self-awareness are rooted in strong solidarity ties, which are in large part based on the duty of defending other members of the group when attacked. Groups exist on various levels: family in the largest sense of the word, friends, neighborhood, the housing project as a whole, and the school. So the peer group is proactive in any conflicts that arise. Even if the fight is a duel between two people (for example just after school, as I often observed while teaching), the peer group plays a very important role in the process. Before the fight, peers encourage the protagonists and push them to action. They witness the fight. Then they put an end to it by separating the combatants. While for the two protagonists and their relatives the fight entails physical risks, for the rest of the group a fight represents an opportunity to celebrate the value of a fellow group member or of the group.

Exchanges of violence must be seen as part of a larger relational system that turns on vengeance. In modern societies, vengeance is strongly forbidden and punished by law. The legal system is supposed to deal with conflicts between individuals by punishing delinquents and criminals and by imposing monetary damages for injuries. But some societies have another way of dealing with conflicts: vengeance is a valued social norm, and acts of vengeance are praised (Péristiany 1965; Verdier 2004). This is the system that operates within peer groups of teenagers in urban housing projects in France. If a teenager, a group of friends, or a family that has been wronged does not take vengeance, they are stepping out of the bounds of the normal relational system. Yet this system may end in the destruction of the group, and vendetta societies have institutions that mediate conflicts. We must keep in mind that teenagers, individually or collectively, have to make things right by taking vengeance before normal relations can be restored.

Vengeance is linked with honor, which is a core value of street culture. Honor can be defined as the value of a person in his or her own eyes, as well as in the eyes of other members of the group or social environment (Pitt-Rivers 1983). Honor plays a central role in the construction of individual reputation. For these youths, the components of individual reputation vary according to gender.

Gender and Reputation

For boys, reputation is principally built on spectacular and valued actions: physical courage, verbal eloquence, and showing off. Teenagers often exhibit who they are by their clothing, exaggerated gestures, and speech. They can also prove their worth by undertaking illegal actions such as stealing, fighting, and even destroying public property.

For girls, reputation is mainly based on sexual behavior. Modesty in dress and decency in self-presentation are vital. In fact, the good reputation of a girl depends on her ability to control what is being said among gossipers about her sexuality. Girls often have to stand up against disrespect from boys—either verbal or physical.

Here, as in other Mediterranean cultures, the male is responsible for the honor of the female. Thus, husbands are supposed to control the sexual behavior or attitude of their wives, and fathers are supposed to do so for their daughters, and brothers for their sisters. This dynamic is concretely observed in street culture.

On a symbolic level, the male must “honor” the females in his life through the exchange of insults and digs. When a boy is called “son of a bitch” by another, he must face the insults to defend the honor of the women in his family. When boys challenge each other with jibes about the sexual behavior of each other’s mothers, defending the honor of their female relatives is both a ritual and a game.

Honor also plays a major role in conflict resolution. If a person or a group has been wronged, their honor has likewise been damaged, and vengeance is a way of recovering individual or collective honor. In this setting, however, the use of violence is more than a way of recovering honor; it is also a tool to reveal it. In some cases, teenagers’ tendency to look for a fight is based on their drive to gain honor.

In my book, Cœur de banlieue (Lepoutre 1997), I showed that the culture of eloquence and the socially valued use of violence, associated with the system of vengeance, are the frameworks of a typical honor society. There have been different versions of honor societies in history, particularly around the Mediterranean but also elsewhere. A typical example is the aristocratic European society of the seventeenth century, which can be epitomized by this famous verse of Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmond Rostand (1897/2013): “For a yes, or for a no, to fight or to do a verse.” Once again: both violence and eloquence.

Youth Culture and School Conflict

This autonomous and integrated street culture is incompatible with the standards for behavior and speech in schools. Teachers frequently face disorder and students’ indiscipline. When students continue to enact the culture of the street inside the classroom with jibes and raucous laughter, they make it difficult for faculty members to teach in conditions they regard as normal and satisfactory. Sometimes students also bring violence into the school, fighting in the classroom or on the playground, making appointments to fight after school or, rarely, raising a hand against a teacher or another member of school staff.

Of course, conflicts in the classroom are hardly new. Teachers in France were already complaining about disorder and indiscipline in the 1970s (Chapoulie 1987). Literature and cinema depict the showdowns that have always taken place in schools. In 2009, a French film by Laurent Cantet, La Classe, won the Oscar for best foreign film; it depicts the troubles and small victories of an embattled middle school teacher in a typical school of the banlieue with alienated and sometimes hostile students. In reality, the difficulties that teachers encounter in their classrooms everywhere are merely an avatar of the social control of youth.

Nevertheless, it is widely accepted that conditions have changed for the worse in French secondary schools during recent decades. Discipline has apparently undergone an important decline since the 1970s or 1980s. In working-class districts, difficulties keeping order in middle and high schools appear particularly marked. Could this be the result of poor education, as many middle-class commentators seem to believe (Chamboredon and Lemaire 1970)? Or is it the result of school failures among the children of immigrant or working-class parents, as others think (Payet 1995; Van Zanten 2001)? Or is indiscipline in the schools the result of inequalities and academic failures among children whose families encounter huge difficulties, as many sociologists argue (Dubet and Martuccelli 1996; Willis 2011)?

Christophe Andréo has another perspective on the situation. In his book based on his PhD thesis (2005), he analyzes interactions between monitors, the superintendent, and students in a technical high school in the northern neighborhoods of Marseille, where many students belong to immigrant and working-class families. Andréo, who served as a school monitor during his fieldwork, reports that changes affecting school discipline are not due to inequality and school failure. They are, rather, to be explained by the interaction between students and supervisory personnel in the context of two further changes. On one hand, high schools have expanded student recruitment beyond the middle classes. Because of the arrival of teenagers from working-class families, a spirit of contestation and negotiation about rules has become widespread. On the other hand—and this is the most surprising aspect—monitors’ and superintendents’ management of students has been transformed.

Until the late 1970s, monitors in middle schools and high schools worked under the authority of a surveillant général, commonly called the surgé. Those who held this position, usually men, invariably imposed strict discipline and made an indelible impression on students. Then surgé became CPE, short for Conseiller Principal d’Education, or senior educational advisor. While they continued to manage discipline, they were given two other roles: setting up the school’s cultural activities and monitoring individual students, above all those who face personal or family difficulties. Thus, their disciplinary function has greatly diminished. In practice, they are completely free to choose what mission they want to emphasize. Some CPEs focus on cultural events; others act more like social workers. Still others continue to keep order and enforce discipline.

Students in the high school in Marseille come from different social classes and cultural backgrounds. Tensions, conflicts, and thefts are present in the school, alongside friendly relationships. But what is most remarkable is students’ universal rejection of school rules and resistance to their imposition. They use the school in ways that meet their own needs but do not fit the official, institutional definition of its purpose. They consider the high school a place for social relationships; for leisure and entertainment; and to some degree a suitable place for business, where they sell clothes, electronic devices, or drugs.

Andréo (2005) observed students’ pragmatism and opportunism in their course of study, the benefits they get from school, and their relationships with the staff. They can change their course of study over time. They can make their presence at school profitable, for example by staying in the high school at the end of the year to get canteen meals or maintain their rights to a scholarship. They observe their teachers doing their jobs; they may notice their weaknesses; they can see their calculations. They are critical, but also empathic; many students, even the most rambunctious, feel sympathy for their teachers.

Tensions among school monitors themselves are rare and easily resolved, in part because of the clear and simple hierarchy within the school. On one side, there are chiefs: the CPEs and the principal. On the other side there are monitors, including those who, like Andréo, are doing their national service. All are young workers with temporary contracts and equal working conditions. The classic phenomenon of delegating the dirty work does not exist here.

How do monitors maintain order inside the school? Their daily work is made up of seemingly innocuous tasks that occupy most of their time: “doing the door” in front of the canteen at lunchtime and forcing students to wait in line; preventing nonstudents from entering the school during the break; monitoring and managing student absences in a context where absenteeism—including among teachers—is substantial. In each task they face pressure from students’ systematic contestation and incessant tricks.

Monitors experiment and make mistakes. Some improve with experience; others fail and try to avoid student contact, or are even absent themselves. To succeed, they use various resources: mutual support, authority, negotiation, humor, and the distribution of favors (such as those described by Goffman [1961] in psychiatric hospitals). All those tactics may become double-edged swords. Supporting a colleague may weaken a monitor in his or her relations with students. Exercising authority may lead to open conflict. Negotiation must not exceed certain limits. Too much humor abolishes the necessary distance between them and the students. If they use too many favors, they are seen as ineffective.

In short, relations between monitors and students may create negotiated order (Strauss 1992). Each member of the interaction is interested in deflecting or bending the rules for his or her own benefit. Students can use the school in a way that is convenient to their adolescent aspirations. Monitors and CPEs feel more fulfilled by accomplishing a mission of dialogue and mediation between students and the school. Usually they prefer not to define themselves as mere disciplinarians who control and punish students.

This scheme contradicts the widespread idea of generalized disorder in schools. Andréo’s (2005) book highlights the autonomy of students; the ambivalence of their relationship to school; and how they adapt to a system that does not offer some of them, particularly those in downgraded tracks, decent career opportunities. The book also features monitors and CPEs who are not as confused and helpless in their job as is generally believed. They act to maintain their position, often disagreeing with students.

The institutional aspects of discipline pointed out by Andréo (2005) have been analyzed elsewhere in France. For example, Philippe Masson (1999), who studied several high schools and middle schools in western France, has shown that reforms of the 1980s removed a great deal of teachers’ disciplinary power. Students in middle school can no longer be referred to technical classes, and the transition to next grade has become automatic at certain levels. So teachers cannot utilize the threats they used to have at their disposal.

In Brazil, Christophe Brochier, another ethnographer who comes from Marseille, has analyzed the difficulties of maintaining discipline in a school located in a favela (Brochier 2009). He lived for half a year in a big favela of Rio de Janeiro and taught for several months in a middle school there. In Brazil, the schooling of teenagers from working-class families has developed in a way that is comparable to the contemporary situation in France. Indeed, the Brazilian educational system was partly inspired by the French model.

According to Brochier’s (2009) ethnography, discipline is much more relaxed in favela schools than in those in housing projects in France. In the middle school where he taught, control over students seemed to be very weak. Pupils circulate freely in the hallways at all hours. They come in and out of classrooms whenever they want. Classes always start late and take place amid a lot of distractions. But surprisingly, there are few conflicts. Brochier describes an unusual scene: a student, questioned at the blackboard, happily jumps on the back of the teacher, who happily plays the role of horse before the laughing students.

Another striking feature is extreme absenteeism. In Brazil, this phenomenon is usually called “school escape.” Most students leave school for several months. Some are away for a whole year. Every teenager accumulates several years of delay. Despite this situation, a small proportion succeeds in gaining access to high schools, where the atmosphere is more conducive to learning. Some of them manage to continue their education in universities and obtain advanced degrees.

As in the housing projects in France, students in the favelas in Brazil bring aspects of their street culture into the school. However, there are big differences in how educational institutions in the two countries deal with order and discipline. Brochier (2009) highlights the main causes of extreme disorder in the schools in favelas. In Brazil, school principals are elected. If they want to keep their jobs, they have an interest in not causing conflict with their colleagues, so they exercise little authority over teachers. Teachers are less well paid in Brazil than they are in France. For a salary in line with aspirations of the middle class (for example, to enable them to buy a house and a car), they must double their work week, teaching at least 48 hours; some even triple the normal load, teaching up to 60 hours per week. (In favela schools, there are two “services” per day: morning service and afternoon service, depending on the choice of the students. Schools are therefore open from morning until evening.) In these conditions, they have little time to prepare courses and cannot expend too much energy in the classroom. Surveillance personnel are far fewer. Since there is nowhere to keep students when their teachers are absent, they constantly circulate in the corridors.

Summary of Observations on Culture, Discipline, and Control

Explanations of indiscipline at school may insist either on the “poor” education of children from working-class or immigrant families or on the “permissiveness” of contemporary teachers. Sociological researchers usually explain the lack of discipline at schools in terms of a single cause. Some analyze students’ deviant behaviors in relation to social inequalities, school relegation, urban and racial segregation, school failure, the development of an antischool culture, or the rejection of school standards (Dubet and Martuccelli 1996; Payet 1995). Others explain indiscipline at school as a failure of the organization itself, comparing different schools in terms of the stability or high turnover of the teaching staff (Debarbieux 1996/1999).

On the basis of the three research projects presented in this article, I offer another explanatory model that looks at disciplinary matters differently in two respects. On one hand, the phenomena taken into account are quite different, or at least do not fully overlap those analyzed in previous studies. On the other hand, my approach is interactionist. Any social situation can be seen as the result of an interaction process. This approach applies to social control in schools, as it does to all other kinds of social relations. Here, the two main terms of the interaction are the pupils and the staff in charge of “school life”—what we call supervisory personnel in France: the monitors and the CPEs who direct them.

In immigrant and working-class neighborhoods, students’ practices and ways of doing can be understood as a version of a coherent and integrated street culture that took root and developed in the specific context of French public housing after the middle classes moved away from these neighborhoods, beginning in the 1960s and ending in the 1980s. This culture includes specific forms of appropriation of space, such as socializing in dense, public spaces; the invention of slang and original verbal exchanges centered on ritual verbal fights; and a common and highly codified use of violence as a “natural” way of solving some conflicts and as a preferred means of building and maintaining symbolic honor.

Major reforms have been conducted in French secondary schools since the late 1970s. Above all, the surveillant général was transformed into the CPE, who was charged with organizing cultural activities and monitoring students. This new position was intended to take into account the needs and viewpoints of students. It was part of a series of measures designed to liberate the school, to open it to the outside, to make it more democratic with the inclusion of student delegates and parents in the class councils, and to introduce cultural and extracurricular activities. These measures imposed by the state were implemented in stages, following the protests of the late 1960s, which were directed against authoritarianism and academic rigidity. These liberal reforms have led to a net relaxation of disciplinary control. School order has generally become more flexible and more variable than it was prior to these reforms.

These changes, which coincided with the massification of secondary education and the arrival of a large number of working-class children first in middle school and then in high schools, has led to a very messy situation in many secondary schools located in or close to housing projects. But the situation is not as bad as often portrayed by the media, or even by some social scientists. Monitors and students manage to coexist without much conflict. Common ground is usually found, even though it is not necessarily permanent or guaranteed.

We may, however, wonder whether this negotiated order and the relaxation of social control—often involving high tolerance of students’ deviant practices such as absenteeism, lateness, and horseplay in class—will significantly degrade the education of young people from working-class families, diminishing their chances of promotion and their opportunities for further advancement through continued schooling. The middle schools in Brazilian favelas give us an idea of what can happen when schools are responsible mainly for keeping young people out of danger.

Is street culture compatible with school culture? William Labov (1973) showed in his classic research that African American teenagers in ghettos used language to tell stories far more effectively than the language that well-educated middle-class children used for storytelling. In France 30 years later, linguists, who have done research on the language of the banlieue, demonstrated how language was used to express the daily reality of young people in working-class housing projects (Goudaillier 2001; Fagyal 2010; Tetreault 2015). Successful teaching experiments suggest that the school can be more than a simple vector of one-way transmission; even if it is located in the most disadvantaged neighborhood, it can be a place of exchange and productive cultural blending. Several years ago, a couple of inventive literature teachers working in a middle school in a Paris suburb published an original dictionary of slang of the banlieue that they wrote collectively in weekly sessions with their eighty fifth-grade students, titled “Les Céfrans parlent aux Français. Chronique du langage des cités” (Seguin and Teillard 1996).

The notion of exchange assumes that schools can also transmit classic culture to students. Here is what the famous comedic actor Jamel Debbouze said in an interview about a teacher who introduced him to Molière, Steinbeck, and the theater. He recalled,

At the middle school, some teachers gave us the impression we were beggars. Yet outside, the society spent its time judging us, we the youth of public housing. … We reacted in the mode: “You do not love me, I do not love you.” It was as simple as that. We were ruthless. Faced with kids, teachers are often unprotected, they are not prepared, they are afraid. And kids feel it: they take power. In fifth grade, my literature teacher introduced us to improvisational theater. She was not afraid at all. The fact that she was not condescending and did not have contempt in her eyes, but just the desire to pass on her skills, sparked respect. I will remember her all my life, in fact I still call her.

When I started doing improvisational theater, I could let out all the words and discomfort swirling inside me. There was so much frustration, injustice, that I was ready to turn on [a] peanut! I became a moth. A young wolf. Improvisation gave us an alternative. With this help, I could express what I felt at home, what happened with buddies, in a funny and touching way. It saved my life. I was a little handicapped Arab, [dark] complexed and ugly. With improvisation, I had a psychologist in my pocket! She gave me confidence. I was able to shine in front of chicks. When you can attract through what you express, that changes everything!

Compatibility between the street and school cultures probably depends mainly on the degree of physical violence of the street culture, on one hand, and the institutional capacity of schools to deal with and above all to control this kind of deviant behavior of students, on the other. Although the school can be open to all kinds of cultures, including popular teenage cultures, it cannot withstand a high degree of violence within its walls; in that case, it can neither instruct students for future success nor initiate them into civil life. The French, Brazilian, and American street cultures are very different. In the United States, the abandonment of poor neighborhoods, permissive gun laws, and the spread of crack in the 1990s led to very high levels of violence and mortality. The research done by Andréo (2005) and by Brochier (2009) has allowed us to perceive different types of institutional functioning in schools, either in different periods of history in the same country or at the same period in different countries. But temporal comparisons, like spatial comparisons, are difficult because multiple factors come into play.

It would be useful to compare schools with different institutional functions within the same country. But that sort of investigation is not possible in France, given the strong centralization of school policy and reforms that must be applied everywhere in the country. This degree of centralization has not always existed. In their study of the history of upper primary education in France, Jean-Pierre Briand and Jean-Michel Chapoulie described schools that enjoyed considerable autonomy in the early twentieth century (Briand and Chapoulie 1992). The principals who directed these schools defined the length and content of the programs of study, depending on the students they had in their school and the local employment situation. The extreme centralization that exists in France is unusual elsewhere. In Finland, as shown by Cedric Dion and Mélanie Laurent in their beautiful movie titled Demain (2015), primary schools enjoy considerable autonomy, particularly in terms of pedagogy. About 20 years ago the Finnish state decided not to interfere further in school affairs, or at least to interfere less, allowing local administrators, principals, and teachers to do their jobs collectively in the ways they prefer.

Finally, we may ask whether the application of the same institutional system in all the schools within a country is an appropriate solution to problems of school discipline. The need for social control is certainly not the same everywhere. Relationships between students and schools are different in town and countryside; in city centers and the urban periphery; in areas with different cultures; and in bourgeois, working-class, middle-class or socially mixed neighborhoods. Indeed, there can be no global solution to specific discipline issues. The situations are very different depending on time and place. Yet discipline will always remain a compromise among students, monitors, teachers, parents, local school administrators, and the state. When the compromise satisfies the largest number of actors involved in the system, it can yield the best educational outcomes.