“Education Au Développement Durable” : The Meaning and Scope of the Depoliticization of French School Curricula

In France, “Education au Développement Durable” (EDD) defines a set of issues based on the sustainable development objectives promoted by the UN in 2015, and invites to think about the global civic education. This type of education is promoted by the instituted order and produced by the Ministry of National Education; so it fits into the existing relationships of the economic, social, political and cultural fields. Based on an analysis of the content of these curricula, this proposed communication asks the following research question. What kind of ecological education is proposed in French curricula, and what compromises and tensions emerge from this content that respects the instituted order?

Our analysis focuses on the discourse used in curricula : what action verbs are used, what actions are targeted, what changes are defined. In order to verify the effects of this lexicon on youth, this paper will focus on examples taken from an ethnographic survey of eighteen schools and five camp holidays located in an intercommunality in the Hauts-de-France region. It reveals the school's acceptance of the capitalist order. Indeed, EDD promotes an ecology based on the individual responsibility of practices, which ruling out the overhaul of a productivist system. Every child is encouraged to think about sorting waste or watching his energy consumption ; in contrast, the the consequences of capitalism are never approached. We’ll emphasize the inadequacy of lessons that respects the capitalist order, which is trumping the ecological emergency, all the more so as the representatives of local authorities involved in transposing these public policies to the local level adopt a posture of maintaining their position in the field of local power. EDD praises a posture that strengthen discriminations between humans and non-humans, maintaining Nature as a domesticated space but, ironically, a space that we should exploit more virtuously.