The Dictionary of pedagogy was initiated and directed by F. Buisson at the same time as it became one of the main players in the reforms initiated by the Third Republic. This monumental work gives the Republican school a complex image, as soon as it is approached, as eleven specialists in the history of education have done here, based on the discourses held on academic knowledge. It is because these speeches welcome an open and contradictory debate, a veritable war of the ancients and the moderns: the proponents of a “liberal” and “humanist” primary education confront those who continued to refer to a school limited by utility. practices knowledge which it dispenses to the popular classes which frequent it.From one disciplinary field to another, and even within the same field, the main lines of this confrontation vary, but everywhere a reforming will is asserting itself and comes up against the realities of the school form. However, this subtle and changing game which puts in the first edition of the Dictionary (1882-1887) the reforming ideal to the test of the real school is recomposed thirty years later in favor of a New Dictionary (1911) to the smoother and more disenchanted teaching doctrine. What the Dictionary says about school knowledge then makes it possible to follow, from one edition to the next, the adventure of a reforming enterprise and, far from the current stereotypes on the republican |