Vers « l’institutionnalisation » de l’École dans l’Androy (Madagascar) ?

Characterized during a long time by a very low school enrolment, the region of Androy, extreme south of Madagascar, knows, since the mid 1990s, a strong increase in school attendance, at least at the primary level, to the point that nowadays schooling concerns more than three-quarters of rural children in school age. One might be tempted to see in this movement a direct effect of recent governmental and NGO incentives to schooling. However, this increase results from a much more complex process of “institutionalization” of schooling in a context of transformation of power relations in rural areas where the challenge of learning to read and write tends to become dominant. If the acquisition of academic knowledge has been seen as a necessity by the families, the school has not always been considered to be the most appropriate place in this quest of capital. Greater involvement of families in the decision-making process at school seems to bring them now to glimpse schooling as a means to achieve it