THE DISCIPLINE OF CHOICE. How students ‘choose’ further education in French priority education zones

Through an intensive, participant and longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork conducted during 6 years, this paper raises the issue of further education’s choices of French highschool pupils in priority education zones (“Zone d’Education Prioritaire”), in the northern outskirts from Paris. Studied pupils statistically concentrate social properties that lead them to be objectively and subjectively placed at the bottom of the social structure as well as being less likely to have academic ‘success’. The study will focus on pupils following the academic track who are about to pass the bacalauréat, hence having to start to select the aspired and expected curriculum in the higher education system they forecast to enter into. Contrary to the official discourse of “free choice” held by the institution, it shows the constitution amongst pupils of a discipline of choice (Truong, 2013) - a set of social rules for considering options and deciding between alternatives (Reay and Ball, 1997), as well as finding relative information to do so. This discipline of choice acts as a common rationale for subaltern students who remain undecided about their future, showing the importance of territorial stigma (Wacquant, 2007) and the rejection of university (Beaud, 2002) - vs. the praise of a more highly supervised type of further studies - in choices. This rationale leads to ambivalent and contradictory attempts to escape or dis-identify (Skeggs, 1997) - from a set of intwined illegitimate categories (working class group, immigrant background and race, residency in housing projects and stigmatised banlieue, ‘muslim community’ etc.) within a society promoting access to higher education for all by offering a complex, heterogeneous and hierarchical system designed for masses. It illustrates how the possible, the probable, the desirable and the acceptable are articulated in changeable patterns which have been produced by and against the school, underlining its very own internal contradictions.