The lesson and the exercise: some reflections about the history of reading and writing practicals

Abstract

When we discuss the history of the lesson and the exercise, the article shows how to construct the great didactic models that they had structuralized and structuralize the different institutions of schooling in France. The antagonism between lesson and exercise - as between transmission to know and competence; primary, secondary and university education; to read and to write - it questions the borders between primary and secondary and elementary school and high school, in French education. The school practicals referred discuss “how” and “so that” the lessons and the exercises are applied, characterizing the different levels of education and enclosing the school culture of each one of these levels, in other words, the constitution of the school time, the space of the practical ones, the material supports and the referred methods. The analyzed period goes to between the end of century XIII, when they began the high schools in the great European cities, and century XX, when the didactic supports of the new technologies produce the new reading and writing school practicals.