Coming of Age among Peers at School

The successive reforms of the French educational system and the ensuing massification of education have led to the emergence of a “democratized junior high school” in which trajectories vary essentially with the institutions. This process takes a concrete form with the social and ethnic specialization of junior high schools. This segregation transforms the entire range of mechanisms ensuring social reproduction at school. Its magnitude generates a segmentation of the educational offer that contributes to social reproduction, which takes two forms. First, the conditions for the reproduction of educational capital depend partly on the school itself, which tends to play the role previously played by the specialized curricula (filieres). Social reproduction also takes place through social habituses, the preservation and reproduction of which has come to depend directly on schools. In this context, the reproduction of habituses partly escapes the control of the families and is ensured by the schools, which play a central role in the constitution of groups of peers, encounters and relationships between teenagers that are the very principle of the formation and reproduction of social habituses. In the end, this article suggests that school-mediated social reproduction is taking increasingly complex forms and shows the importance of peer groups in the process of teenage socialization. What is today at stake is the capacity of families to control this process, and one of the means by which this control, which is always relative, takes place is the choice of the schooling institution.