The Ideological Projects Underlying the Content of French Textbooks

Abstract

Textbooks remain a privileged place for multiple ideological issues and for transmitting the values ​​of a society. The Algerian education system, which is also attached to the transmission of certain values, uses a manual for teaching French in the 6th year of basic schooling that mainly consists of extracts from literary works. The last two decades, marked by the reform of education programs and contents since 2003, have also seen the release of a 5th year textbook with an exclusive focus on didactic texts.

In this context, the study questions the impact of this shift from literary to didactic support with regard to the transmission of ideologies conveyed through the themes of the reading comprehension texts in the two manuals. It is particularly a question of examining the ways in which certain ideas are transmitted by means of the two supports by first examining the relation between the structuring of the manuals and the types of support, which turns out to conceal ideological projects related to socialism and democracy. Secondly, categorization is carried out with a view to identifying the themes of the texts and their relative proportions at the level of the two textbooks. Thirdly, the qualitative analysis, based on case studies, attempts to identify the ideologies that these themes convey through their textual manifestations. This examination brought out certain ideological points in relation to religion, identity and universal values, through explicit and implicit themes in connection with Islam, the history of Algeria and the liberation struggle, the virtues and human faults and the protection of flora and fauna.