Vocational colleges not for the blue-collar workers

This article analyses the changes being made in the professional lycees (highschools) in connection with the modernization of the Sochaux production center and the emergence of new types of jobs in the steel industry : gradual closure of engineering classes and creation of professional baccalaureats, known as ''bacs pro'', longer schooling for students in the professional lycee (LEP), new hope of getting a ''bac'' and going on to a BTS (Brevet de technicien superieur). As a participant observer in the professional lycee (workshop, class council, oral presentation of work experience in a firm), the author studied two types of contradiction connected with the attempt to promote an elite within the professional lycee - the professional baccalaureats. The first brings out the gap between the high standards inherent in the professional bac diploma on the one hand and, on the other, the lack of investment on the part of these ''undermotivated'' students for whom this new track represents above all a means of staying in school for the time being. The second type of contradiction, associated more with the rapprochement between school and workplace, has to do with the fact that, during their outside work experience, the professional bac students are placed in a false position: dropped into workshops in the process of being restructured and placed in direct contact with the latest forms of labor resistance, they both learn the imperative need to rationalize production and experience, within the process of industrial manufacture, the social distance growing up between them and their father's generation of workers. The analysis of the changes to the local professional lycees thus functions as a sort of magnifying glass, blowing up the misunderstandings and contradictions fermenting in the working class, the progressive disappearance of a working-class legacy handed down by fathers whose social position has been weakened by economic insecurity and the growing lack of representation in politics and the unions.