Orientation scolaire et héritages sociaux.Approche socio-anthropologique du processus d'orientation vers l'enseignement qualifiant dans le bassin post-industriel de Charleroi

(eng) This doctoral work encompasses guidance counseling towards the technical and vocational tracks in secondary school in the French Community of Belgium. The dynamics involved in guidance counseling are nowadays an important research subject as guidance of students lies at the centre of major political concerns. The work is based on a qualitative approach in which classical methods of anthropology were used. The fieldwork took place in five secondary schools located in the post-industrial area of Charleroi with forty young people and their family, with teachers and other agents involved in the school guidance. The starting point of this doctoral work focuses on the social origin of young people in their school environment. It therefore hinges on the classical inequalities reproduction in the school system. Indeed, it has always been the working-class young people who have been progressively guided towards technical and vocational subjects. One studies the socio-anthropological mechanisms which conduce the working-class youth (which means young people from the bottom of social hierarchy) to fields of study that are situated at the bottom of school hierarchy. In the 70?s, the reproduction theorists argued that the school as an ideological institution reproduced the social hierarchy (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970). In the seventies, Paul Willis showed that it is too simple to say that students have not the choice (Willis: 1977). With his ethnographic work, he showed that working-class boys were animated by the working-class culture, lived and shared in the relations deeply rooted in the local. But since the work of Paul Willis a lot of authors, and Willis himself, have tried to show the impact of social transformations, like the de-industrialization and the rising of individualization on the state of the social structure and in the same time on the state of the individual and collective identities. These transformations contribute to the disappearance of the symbolic elements of the working class and to the laxity of the relation between the social class, the culture and the individual identity. This work tries to study the influences of class cultures inheritances in guidance counselling. The first part focuses on it studying the individualization processes of the studied young people. Paying attention to the identity and symbolic elements of their social group, one argues that some of them contribute to their own tracking: based on the cultural inheritances of their family and their social group, ?their appropriate their own school trajectory?. But because of the history of their families and their economical difficulties, others are more guided by the school system and the teachers from the top of the school hierarchy: ?their re-appropriate their school trajectory, against their cultural inheritances?. That is why the second part pays attention to guidance practices of the teachers and to the principles with which teachers advise the young people. It shows how the social representations of their social group, the cultural past of their school and the ?appropriations? of the students stabilize their decisions in guidance counselling while ?re-appropriations? give to them ethical tensions.