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Backward countryside, troubled city: French teachers' images of rural and working‐class families
Author(s) -
REEDDANAHAY DEBORAH,
ANDERSONLEVITT KATHRYN M.
Publication year - 1991
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.1991.18.3.02a00070
Subject(s) - ideology , idealization , sociology , working class , irrationality , privilege (computing) , rationality , everyday life , bourgeoisie , rural area , gender studies , class (philosophy) , family life , social science , epistemology , politics , political science , law , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics
French primary school teachers criticize both urban working‐class and rural families, but often for different reasons. Their discourse about families reflects conflicting themes in French culture—the romanticization of rural life and the idealization of the bourgeois family model. Our analysis shows that the dominant ideology of the family in France is not coherent, and that teachers make use of ambiguous symbols and images of the family in order to privilege the “rationality” of the middle classes over the “irrationality” of the lower classes. We argue that more attention must be placed on such “everyday uses of domination” so that the contradictions and ambiguities inherent in dominant ideologies may be better understood. [ education, ideology, France, social class ]