L' Elève des bulletins scolaires

Le spectre sémantique d’un modèle utopique

Abstract

The dichotomy between the good and the bad student seems really outdated today. The method used to summarize academic results and to report about them in writing has changed in a positive manner despite the routines still rooted in teachers’ practices. In this paper, we will analyze the semantic orientation of the word “student” when it is used in school reports’ assessments.

The concordances drawn from a certified body will be compared to the student as modelled in official guidelines and in educational sciences, or as sketched in the representations of the teachers in the field whether they are beginners or veterans. We will demonstrate that the use of this word and its almost systematic collocations in school reports show semantic qualities that betray an underlying definition of the perfect student, who is obviously unattainable since he or she is actually a future individual, the perfect student who is already highly praised. These praises are linked to his or her personality traits more than his or her school work strictly speaking. The perfect student is complimented through afferent semes which paradoxically end up excluding the teacher from this raison d’être although it is necessarily a two-way relationship