Les savoirs locaux face aux écoles burkinabè Négation, instrumentalisation, renforcement

Abstract

Customary and family education are, since the 1990s, being replaced with schooling in Africa south of the Sahara. Owing to the influence of sponsors and NGOs, schooling is reaching out into isolated areas, such as the Gurma province of Gnagna in Burkina Faso. What prospects does «local knowledge» have in this context ? Although curricula set store on this sort of knowledge, teachers tend to adopt methods involving denial, refusal, exploitation or identification. These four processes vary depending on how schooling fits into the village setting (public schools, NGO bilingual schools, literacy centres). The local knowledge discussed in the classroom tends to be practical (technical, behavioural, local) know-how rather than cognitive categories (such as the causality of magic). Teachers do not deal with the latter because they know nothing about them, disparage them or lack distance. Local knowledge, when extracted from its original cognitive categories, is, we assume, condemned to petrification and extinction. Paradoxically, the absence of debates in schools about local cognitive categories allows the latter to survive and be used.