Cayouette-Remblière, Joanie <br/><br/>
The Lower Middle Classes and the Schooling Injunction 

 -  2015.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> This article analyzes the reasons for the resilience of socially differentiated choices of academic tracks after the second “schooling explosion.” By using both the reconstitution of the scholastic trajectory of two entire cohorts and an ethnographic survey, it brings into focus an unarticulated contradiction in the discourse of school representatives : on the one hand, their views and their practice are based upon the hierarchy between general education and vocational training ; on the other hand, they deny this hierarchy and lament its existence. The paper then analyzes the pathways through which this denied hierarchy is transmitted to students. It thus contextualizes the production of educational “projects” by outlining four principles of educational orientation : the “abnormal” orientation of students from the middle and upper classes ; the orientation of boys coming from the upper fringes of the lower middle class, which is perceived “unrealistic” ; the “generous” orientation of some girls from the lower middle class ; and the orientation by exclusion and self-exclusion of the lowest fringes of the lower middle class.