16

The creation of the National Program Council (NPC) in 1990 marks a double break in the history of education program reforms. The first relates to the temporality and institutional framework of program transformations: the NPC is the instrument of a coordinated, global and simultaneous reform of all disciplines according to common and transversally applicable principles. The second is a change in the balance of power between the players involved in the reforms: the creation of the NPC results in the fact that the General Inspectorate and associations of specialists were put aside for the benefit of the NPC, the minister's office and the educational departments of the ministry . To explain this double break, this article studies the mechanisms of legitimation, commissions and reports, as well as the individual and collective players who led to the creation of the NPC. It demonstrates what the symbolic effectiveness of these schemes owes to their systemic and global approach of contents, to the strong political support they receive, to their openness to players usually excluded from the debate on programs and to the mobilization of scientific legitimacy in competition with pedagogical and disciplinary legitimacy. Finally, this article shows the contradictions of a system oscillating between autonomy and political exploitation of scientific legitimacy and their consequences on the future NPC.