Street culture or school culture?

Abstract

This article presents a study on the construction of deviant attitudes and practices on the part of French adolescents or immigrants. It is based on a fieldwork that included observations and interviews conducted along two years in a school of the Parisian periphery. The central hypothesis is that the adolescents of the outskirts neighborhoods, as they enter secondary school, are already predisposed to the culture of the school or to the culture of the street; predispositions that were structured in the family, in the community or in the elementary schools. Therefore, it is at the secondary schools, in interaction with processes specifically related to the school, that some of them develop deviant conducts. This text evokes, firstly and in a general way, how the youths perceive the questionings and differences between the school and the neighborhood. It then shifts its focus to three dimensions of the adolescent sociability that express the tensions between the street and the school: the juvenile friendships, the sociability in the classroom and the interethnic relationships. The conclusion emphasizes the importance of processes of school segregation, in the school as a whole and within the classrooms, to the loss of the integrative ability of the school.