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which would have forced it to fight against selection itS6lf and against
the educational system in its entirety - but for the right of everybody
to enter the selecting machine.
The contradictory character of this demand remaineri masked as
long as the right was theoretically granted to everyone, but the prac–
tical possibility of using that right was denied to the great majority.
However, from the moment when, with the help of the spread of
knowledge, the majority approaches the acquisition of the practical pos–
sibility of using a theoretical right, the contradiction surfaces: if the
majority has access to higher education, that education loses its selective
character. The right to education and the right to social advancement
can no longer go hand in hand: if, hypothetically, everyone can in fact
be educated, not everyone can in fact be elevated to a privileged posi–
tion. Once the mechanisms of student selection have been subjected
to attack, society will attempt either to establish complementary mech–
anisms or to limit the right to an education by administrative measures.
3. These administrative limitations -
numerus clausus,
entrance
examinations for the university - are such delicate political issues that
the successive governments of the Fifth Republic never instituted them.
In fact, the limitation
ex ant.e
of the number of students is an open,
brutal negation of a juridical principle and of a social fiction; that is,
that the
opportunity
for social advancement by means of education is
equal for everyone and that the
possibility
of being educated is only
limited by the
aptitude
for study.
To destroy this juridical fiction is to expose the illusory character
of bourgeois liberties, and is, above all, to challenge head on in the
name of technocratic rationality - education is expensive and it's not
profitable when graduates cannot be "elevated" - the middle classes
(so-called) whose support the capitalist regime can conserve only by
holding out prospects of "social elevation" limited by merit alone.
Nu–
merus clausus,
preselection, university entrance examinations, by ae–
straying the illusions of meritocratic ideology, would set up the middle
classes against the capitalist state and would reveal to them their condi–
tion as a social fate: they are made up not of
potential bourgeois
whom
the chances of birth and fortune have prevented from becoming real
bourgeois, but of an infantry of hard-up types and subordinate work–
ers destined to serve the bourgeoisie, not to equal it.
Politically - and that is the meaning of the Faure reform - the
bourgeoisie must therefore maintain the fiction of the opportunity for
social advancement open to everyone through free access to education.
However, it is reality that nOw takes on the burden of showing up that
