ABSTRACT
Five years ago in his preface to the first edition of the book from which this chapter is drawn, Daniel Hameline recalled that the history of schoolteaching is a ‘faltering history’. Undoubtedly this point could be illustrated today by the history of differentiated education: indeed, several centuries before the introduction of this term by Louis Legrand in 1973, there were already traces of his idea in the instructions given by J.-B. de La Salle in 1706 for the running of his schools;1 in them, he stressed the importance of the individual monitoring of pupils and asked for the homogenizing effects of grouping in classes to be offset by a thorough examination of the progress of each pupil and the individual setting of exercises carefully selected for the level that he had reached. Two centuries later, in her school in Dalton, Massachusetts, Miss Parkhurst developed a ‘teaching plan’ in which, for each subject and each class level, the programme was divided into ten monthly contracts, themselves broken down into weekly tasks organized by the teachers according to the pupils’ needs. A few years later, Washburne, in the school in Winnetka, after a major survey of children’s potential for assimilation, devised the abolition of classes and their replacement by progressions strictly adapted to individual needs. Certainly, this was imbued with Taylorian ideas, which were very fashionable at that time in the economic field, and envisaged a form of education which we would more readily describe as ‘breaking in’; but the work that he carried out was none the less considerable. Some time later, Freinet, from quite a different perspective, proposed, alongside group activities designed to ensure the child’s socialization and the completion of learning, a system of self-marked files allowing each child to progress at his or her own pace and according to needs identified with the teacher. In a totally different ideological and institutional context but in an unquestionably close relation educationally, Pierre Fauré developed what he called ‘individualised communal teaching’2 and he too suggested that, for at least part of the school timetable, the running of the class in imposed groups, based on the still mistaken belief in the homogeneousness of pupils, should be suspended and replaced by individual and small-group activities allowing the child to be active and involved in an education
programme suited to him or her. We must also cite Claparede and Cousinet, Dottrens, Oury and many others who have all endeavoured to orchestrate this key idea whose simplicity of wording is perhaps misleading as to the ease of its implementation: ‘It is the child who learns and no one can learn in his place…And since no two pupils are identical, there is no successful learning without differentiated teaching’.
