Children flow within the local school-medical field in a working-class district in France
How to explain the heterogeneity of medical-school trajectories of children attending school in a working-class district of a metropolis in contemporary France? The regulation of child populations would no longer be done solely through families’ control. Yet, it would consider individual biomedical criteria that product new child categories and the development of a liberal paramedical market. This is in line with the emergence of “learning disorders,” which have exploded massively since the 2000s, in response to the laws on disability and inclusive education. Based on an ethnographic survey conducted from 2017 to 2019 in medical-school institutions in a district of France, this article shows the articulation of the neuroscientific paradigm and parental determinism by professionals, parents, and their effects on child trajectories. Parental, child and professional strategies are analyzed through child cases. A cross-reference was performed using observational data from speech therapy offices, a school medical center and in-depth interviews with mothers. This article highlights two main results. First, an extension of the neuroscientific paradigm applies to childhood and schooling with the creation of a “local medical-school field.” Second, the emergence of a “new school hygiene” built on biomedical standards and school criteria. This flow of child populations testifies to the sorting process linked to the production of new medical-school categories. Such process has an unprecedented impact on medical-school trajectories in the context of injunctions to academic success.