This paper explores the division of work in schools and colleges from the United States, France and Quebec, and shows the impact of the increase of technical agents mainly characterized by pre-university training and auxiliary work, as compared to that of teaching and non-teaching professionals (psychologists, psychoéducateurs, social workers, careers advisers). The authors focus on the work categories that offer supervision services to children, more or less related to pedagogy or students' behavior management, which excludes the work categories that perform administrative (secretaries) or manual (janitors, building maintenance, bus drivers) tasks. An outline of the number of these school agents in the United States, France and Quebec precedes a synthetic description of their respective functions. To understand better the presence and recent growth of these categories in school environments, the authors then propose various interpretative hints related to changes that affect school in different ways: the division of work at school, deprofessionalization, the emergence of a commercial model in education, massification, the need for new models centered on empathy to manage a-school behaviors, and the loss of institutional legitimacy (linked to the fact our societies are passing from an old model of modernity to a new one). The authors particularly emphasize the risk of seeing this technical staff, whose training is different from that of the teaching and non-teaching professionals, introduce in schools a normative pluralism that may lead to a certain form of institutional instability.
Work division at school; Technical work; "Difficult" student's behavior management; Institutional instability
