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Through the example of mass education, a truly common space provides us with the opportunity to emphasize the usefulness of studying political rhetoric over time. This study may contribute to seeing beyond the crisis of constructivism and help find shortcuts to analyze how relationships are created between everyday behavior and general principles without resorting to all the intermediary processes. It also enables a new beginning for criticism in the sociology of education: supporters of and opponents to mass education alike make claim to its critical function. The Enlightenment sought a school separated from religion in order to set children free from the prejudices of the world. The New School rejected this separation. In turn, Bourdieu and Passeron denounced the promise of equal opportunity as a justification for the independence of French schools. Such criticism made it possible for a system of decentralized governance to introduce market-oriented principles in schools. The different trajectories proposed show the heterogeneity of critical viewpoints on education. Understanding how this topic can have moved within one century from the supporters of the Ancien Régime to those of the Popular Front, then to European technocracy, leads us to construct an exterior context that may contribute to renewed critical thinking.