Innovation and Society

Introduction

Education and training are implicated in all society’s important questions, to the extent that, in France, school has become a focus for social tensions and difficulties such as drugs, authority, respect for others, violence, harassment, religious faith, sustainable development, social and ethnic inequalities.

Is it not said that every society gets the school that it deserves?

In fact, education is deeply entwined with our uncertainty faced with a future whose shape we can only see poorly. And yet, we never cease to want the best for our children, and so we work towards this goal by providing everything that we consider good for them, with a deep desire to intervene in the present so as to accomplish this worthy wish. The present is interpreted as offering possibilities for the future, and school is thus the melting pot for interventions among the youth, still malleable and subject to the beliefs and intentions of adults1. Adults believe that they can work with these possibilities and inscribe their dreams on them: it is from this that pedagogical innovations emerge, as containers without specific content2.

In a way, the world of schooling is imbued with a passion: that of wanting to change the present, bend it towards a very different society to come, always considered the bearer of a brighter future than the present, that the adults will open before the first steps of children.

This is the issue with schooling; we cannot observe it without tainting our observation with the urge to reform it. However, this observation has changed over the years, and it is clear that more than a century ago, school was a luxury for many and represented the hope of social and cultural upward mobility. The corollary of this was the development of an elite, or rather a caste, which was very much linked to the social level of the family. Now that schooling is compulsory, it has become more banal, the source of growing criticism, and considered a consumer good. It is hard to see schools once more being closed to the majority for the benefit of a minority (although…) and we will see how this is reflected in the facts, notably through the prism of innovation.

And yet, make no mistake: when we survey the landscape of schooling, many great changes have taken place. This does not, however, mean the disappearance of social division, which indeed seems more insidious in its process, while being more visible and felt less clearly. It is often described as counter-intuitive, an involuntary outcome, the result of the implementation of certain innovations which have in practice had a preferential impact on already-favored student populations. However, as some would say: school changes! Again, we must examine how this happens, the place and the role of the factory of innovation in transformation3.

For more than half a century, in France, after having invaded the territory of the economy and of technology, innovation has conquered education, including schools. The exponential use of the term to designate different activities has often confused matters. We must at least recognize that using the term allows the user to find themselves in a position to create something new, to reply to a need emanating from multiple sources, a need which is felt and must be filled. Innovation is on the whole considered positive – with magical consequences.

According to intellectuals, our current society appears confronted with a multiplicity of movements and changes, faced with the acceleration of time (have you noticed how our young people speak more quickly than their parents and how the immediacy of Twitter entertains their thought?).

If innovation at school is invoked more and more as a way of escaping the difficulties linked to the complex objectives and purposes of school, it nonetheless remains the case that this innovation has never really benefited from serious work on its meaning, its sense and its impact. Is this not primarily due to the new identity that contemporary schools have taken on? How would we define an ideal school so as to achieve a consensus?

And yet, this is not for lack of focusing on the problem and suggesting all sorts of remedies, or rather informed advice!4

Innovation is most often invoked in business in conjunction with a creative spirit, which is able to develop new products for the presumed greater benefit of the company to which it belongs. It is thus understood as the original appearance of a tangible object, often perfected by technology. To understand this form of innovation, therefore, we only need to follow the trajectory of the emergence of the prototype up to its testing and its generalization, a trajectory which is certainly complex, but which is difficult to follow in the case of social innovation, the category to which innovation in schools belongs.

Over the last 10 years, innovation has conquered the economic domain, faced with a world of investors who seek consistent financial profit from new production. The permeability of innovation with regard to the ecosystem has rendered it frugal – that is, less costly in energy, requiring the marketing of products which are less energy-hungry, while still improving their performance. The often-criticized consumer society produces innovations which are more ecologically friendly, while still being more useful (for example, electric cars). Is innovation, then, no more than an adaptive response to social transformation?

Innovation has also been – somewhat less valued in its infancy than technical innovation – introduced to the associative social network in the form of social innovation. This takes the form of a perceived response to unmet social needs such as health, the aging of the population or food supplies. It seems that innovation at school is closer to the nature of social innovation than technical innovation. We can then ask why, among the many social innovations studied through reports and publications, innovation at school is so seldom mentioned. What might be so specific and particular about innovation in education that it fails to excite debate?

What justifies such caution? Given that words become worn out more quickly than their content, this is doubtless due to its longevity compared to more recent words such as educational transition or pedagogical experimentation or alternative schooling, in various registers. In the end, it is enough to give an unchanging social activity a new name for it to become something different (at least, for those with little memory). There is thus some aspect of educational transition which proves its value in the very goal of innovation: to create a more just world through schooling. Utopia5?

What differentiates Freinet’s pedagogy from a contemporary innovative pedagogy based on written correspondence organized between students at two distant schools? Is it the fact of using tablets or computers? Sending mail to correspondents on the other side of the world via the Internet? What constitutes the quiddity of innovation in education, especially in pedagogy, where after centuries the fundamental question remains: how does a small human being learn, and how do they develop socially and intellectually? Does the explanation lie in the unceasingly changing context, and – if so – do the multiple questions at the heart of education remain the same in the face of sometimes contrasting ideologies, convinced of their righteousness? However, revisiting the pedagogies of certain precursors, considered by many to be obsolete and outdated, may be a salutary reminder for certain pedagogies which claim to be innovative. Did Durkheim not write:

I believe that it is only in studying the past that we become able to anticipate the future and to understand the present, and that, consequently, a history of teaching is the best of pedagogical studies6.

This book attempts to shed light on this question by laying out the origins, directions and issues of innovation when occurring in schools, including in the pedagogical relationship.

To do this, we will discuss the socio-historical context of innovation while explaining it in the context of school. We will then survey the different levels and fields of innovation (from the organizational to the personalized pedagogical relationship), to lead to an analysis of innovation occurring in public or private schools, with its political and ideological consequences.

The conclusion of this work will take the form of a question: in the end, what makes us want to innovate, without going backwards, amid the strong politicization of new activities, given the current profusion of alternative schools with different pedagogies, which seem at first sight to possess the same conceptual ingredients and rhetorical register, and which, fundamentally, in their actual organization, obey different social ideologies? What is the meaning of the growing role of foundations, of alternative schools and of sponsorship, faced with schools which declare themselves to be innovative? Is this a sign of a neoliberalism which dares not speak its name in schools? The enthusiasm with which politicians take schooling and proposals for innovation hostage shows the extent to which no-one has any interest in clarifying this notion, and what it hides in terms of implications and explanations. Is innovation therefore a gimmick for amusing the spectators, or a necessity for the real evolution of schools?

1 Did not Durkheim say that education is the action exerted by adult generations on those who are not yet ripe for social life? It has for its object to arouse and develop in the child a certain number of physical and mental states which political society in its entirety, and the social milieu to which he or she is particularly destined, demand from him or her (Education and Sociology, PUF, 3rd edition, p. 51, 1992).

2 By this I understand that the momentum towards a better future represented by innovation often relegates what provoked it to the background.

3 On this subject, see the works of Antoine Prost, notably Du changement de l’école : les réformes de l’éducation de 1976 à nos jours, Le Seuil, Paris, 2013.

4 Two bodies were commissioned to make proposals on rescuing schooling from its ghetto and opening it towards a learning society: the Taddei committee, which concentrates on the place of school in a learning society, and the National Council of Innovation for educational success. The two reports were published simultaneously in March 2017.

5 Les Cahiers Pédagogiques are not wrong; the link between society and school is complex. Is that organization's motto not: Changing school to change society; changing society to change school?

6 DURKHEIM E., L’évolution pédagogique en France, PUF, Paris, p. 16, 1938.

1

Innovation in Socio-Historical Context

1.1. Meaning and significance of the word innovation

1.1.1. The origins of innovation

Innovation is part of today’s habitual way of speaking which consists of projection into the future, that is, transformation of the present time to invite individuals to become project animals: teaching people to do projects is our contemporary redemption. Thus, innovative projects abound, furnished with the best assets in their supposedly beneficial aspirations. Their establishment and inevitable decay, up to disappearance, resulting from their confrontation with complex social reality, are filled with contradictions.

However, innovation has not always been synonymous with development regarded as positive, linear and rational. From the Middle Ages up until the 16th Century, innovation was seen as disruptive, transgressive, disturbing, even Satanic. It was urgent to maintain institutions in their current state, and to struggle against attacks linked to any desire for transformation. Respect for institutions such as the Church was fundamental. Whoever wanted to introduce something new was condemned as a heretic. We must understand that there were two kinds of innovation: those carried out for the material benefit of people, regarding which religions had contrasting positions, even internally; and those which innovated in religious practices themselves, for example, saying the Catholic mass in the vernacular language instead of Latin. It is thus impossible to state that religions have always been firmly opposed to innovation; they have often subtly played with it in order to reinforce their identity and their contemporaneity.

Michel de Montaigne hated innovation: Nothing oppresses a state, he wrote, except innovation; change only brings about injustice and tyranny. In his Essays, innovation is synonymous with novelty, a word which the author used in a pejorative sense.

The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns came from the need for solid and stable models, as society was perceived as intrinsically fragile and the fear of returning to primeval chaos was strong. Diderot himself wrote: all innovation is to be feared in government. The meaning of the term innovation was, in that era, apocalyptic, in strong contrast with the modern flavor of the term. This Quarrel illustrates the tension between these two extremes.

The rise in power of science and technology has led us to a positive connotation of the term, linked to examples of inventions as brilliant as they are useful. From the start of the 19th Century, innovation became the god that we still worship today.1

As the taste for innovation became stronger, the definition of the word became radicalized to the point of excluding tradition and imitation. Innovation thus took over in all domains, including that of painting, where modern art appeared, or in literature, surrealism. A kind of terrorism of innovation seems to have gradually appeared, emerging from a blank slate. Girard would go as far as to speak of self-deception. He raised the question of the very important role of imitation, which seemed relegated to the background or even to disappear, in the process of learning2. He added:

When the humility inherent to the master-disciple relationship is seen as humiliation, the transmission of the past becomes difficult, or even impossible.

In other words: innovation, imitation and tradition are components of the same process of social evolution.

1.1.2. Innovation as the inverse of tradition

There is no innovation without tradition, that is to say, without the roots which fertilize innovation, invite it to build on the old to create the new, to give it meaning. Was it not Paul Ricoeur who said:

Tradition in the singular means transmission of things said, of beliefs professed, of norms assumed. It is thus first of all to cross a temporal or cultural distance. Now, this crossing is only possible if tradition remains half of the couple which it forms with innovation. In my previous work, I referred several times to this tradition-innovation couple, tradition representing the side of the debt owed to the past and the reminder that nothing comes from nothing.3

We must add here that tradition is endlessly revisited by those who consider it, including for pedagogical innovation, through pedagogues of the past such as Pestalozzi, Montessori, Steiner or Freinet. It is doubtless through contemporary reading, often unconsciously, of the great pedagogues of the past that innovation, the other side of the coin, appears. Moreover, as Ricoeur specifies in the same work, this is not so much in what might have happened than in the unfulfilled promises of the past. In addition, this past is part of a future for those who lived in it, in what Koselleck4 calls the past future.

In fact, innovation frequently emerges from dissatisfaction felt at the present, thus becoming a possible response to overcome this dissatisfaction. Now, the latter does not arise from nothing, but is part of the momentum of a reality which must be surpassed. This momentum is the product of a knowledge of the past and its possible futures which were not able to come to pass. In this sense, pedagogical innovations are strictly linked with the past experiences, sometimes in an unconscious manner, of their initiators, if we consider that a society’s relationship to its past experiences and to its hopes conditions its possibilities of action. Koselleck adds:

Throughout modern times, the difference between experience and expectation never ceases to grow or, more exactly, modern times only experience themselves as new times from the moment when expectations, in their impatience, become more and more remote from all previous experience. (p. 324)

All this is linked to the fact that innovation cannot dispense with time, particularly with what Bachelard5 describes as psychic time: duration is only a number whose unit is the moment. It is a dust of moments, more, a group of points which are grouped together more or less closely by a phenomenon of perspective. It is doubtless because time is seen as the present moment that the past is mishandled, when it is consubstantial with creation and innovation!

1.1.3. Innovation versus invention and creation

Nietzsche wrote that only that which has no history can be defined. Now, although innovation is indeed a concept which, since the 13th Century, has been used extensively in many societies, it is our current era that uses and abuses it to designate exponentially a collection of activities considered to be economically as well as socially beneficial.

First of all, three words are often confused with innovation and have a common point of involving the new: invention, creation and innovation.

Invention has marked our history: throughout time, human beings have sought to increase their power to act on their environment and thus to acquire ever more powerful intellectual and material means6. It consists of an act often seen as the fruit of a single person to whom we give the name of inventor, even if, when we look from further away, this invention is closely linked to its context. Another word is very close to it: discovery and, for example, discussions around the discovery of the printing press by Gutenberg bear witness to this. In fact, although the inventor and the discoverer are clearly designated and often glorified, they did not spring out of thin air, but in a social context which allowed their emergence. Simply put, until recently, context has not been taken into account in the forms of thinking about society.

We find this in historical perspectives, which were once stories about great men and the great events which marked them out, while now history is centrally focused on the daily lives of people7. Now, concerning Gutenberg, it is said that other individuals of the same era were on the cusp of inventing the printing press! Galileo in 1623 evokes the inventor of the telescope, making him out to be an opportunist in a situation where its components were at hand and a possible new usage was conceived:

We are certain that the inventor of the telescope was a simple optician who, manipulating by chance various shapes of glass, also happened by chance to look through two of them, one convex, the other concave, held at different distances from his eyes. He realized with astonishment the effect they produced, and from there, discovered the instrument.

The inventor is often convinced that his idea, formulated as a dream or a utopia, will be called upon to become a founding practice.

Schumpeter himself distinguished invention (art of insight) and innovation (the carrying out of combinations). The first is exogenous with respect to the field, whereas the second, innovation, is an endogenous factor, a process that arises from the field and only has meaning in its socialization: Invention is an exogenous factor from the endogenous character of innovation.

Innovation is thus an invention which has succeeded, in the sense that it becomes integrated into people’s social practice towards a goal which subsequently becomes institutionalized, that is,