Histoire de l'éducation, n°151/2019

Following on from Volume 150 dealing with five historiographical studies on pupils history, this issue offers five contributions that examine various questions related to archives, printed sources and statistical surveys and highlight the methodological dimensions of writing this specific History. Sources on students are often incomplete and indirect. Written by adults for other adults, administrative sources can either report a situation or help in decision-making. The students are present but stay in the background, considered as units of account revealing the good health or the crisis of the educational structure. The cross-referencing sources make it possible to combine national data with departmental or local realities, archives and printed texts, and enable to show the student figure, as developed in the contributions of Dominique Julia, Jean le Bihan and Solenn Huitric. Memoirs, autobiographies and memories, when organized within a corpus, bring a lot of information about the student life, as Pierre Caspard points it out. The historian can also benefit from the sources that the Ministry of education services build, as analysed by Jean-Paul Caille and Jérôme Krop who explored the student panels set up from the 1960s, a significant source for the historian who works on the history of students and the reconstruction of their school careers.