French school debates of recent years, which are simultaneously debates about the French Republic s identity and values, have generated a spate of internationally successful literature and film on the topic of education. While mainstream media and scholarly essays tend to treat these works as faithful representations of classroom reality, The Pedagogical Imagination takes a different approach.
In this study of French education and republicanism as represented in twenty-first-century French literature and film, Leon Sachs shifts our attention from what literature and film say...