School Failure and democracy: Questions, realities, concepts, problems and research results

Abstract

The concept of school failure and the democratization of the school system, or, in other words, the democratic access to knowledge, are closely related. And yet this relationship is eminently problematic because of their contradictory natures. At their core multifaceted and indicative of conflicting realities, they lose many of their contradictions in analysis. In order to better understand this relationship (and thereby respond more appropriately) we need to overcome the risky separa- tion we make between the sociology of unequal educational opportunities and research on teaching and learning. While the one does not pay enough attention to the effective transmission and acquisition of knowledge and learning tech- niques, the other pays too little attention to the various social, institutional and instructional contexts in which learning is situated. This would mean that we need to establish new relationships between sociology, psychology and teaching methodology.