La Grande École du Numérique : The paradoxes of a Politic of Promotion of Technical Education Based on Computer Programming
Since 2013, we have seen the emergence in France of a number of initiatives promoting computer coding schools. Presented as an obvious fact, because accompanying the digital transformation of organizations, in this sense in 2015, a French national label called “Grande École du Numérique” was created, which certifies these schools and intends to train 10,000 new people in three years. There are now 400 coding schools certified by this system, and several thousand people have been trained. The institutionalization of this initiative has been very fast: there were indeed less than nine months between the announcement of the device and its implementation. The purpose of this article is to show how this valorization can seem paradoxical. We will see that around the notion of “computer code”, we are seeing a promotion of computer code as a skill. We will see that this valorization of the code concerns above all a symbolic level and that on the theoretical and empirical levels it confronts itself with many contradictions, as well at the level of the history of the teaching of computer programming, as by the place occupied by code developers in the division of labor, but also and especially in economic and social terms with regard to professional insertion.