Though it is present in many surveys on adult education and training, the issue of couples confronting the experience of continuing education has not been directly explored. Scholars have noted how both positive and negative pressure from the family often acted as a driving force or an obstacle to the entrance in a training course. But the effects of adult learning on couples themselves have been little studied despite the fact that several surveys from the 1960’s revealed higher than average divorce rates among audiences in evening courses. This paper will propose an historical approach to this question using examples from a documentary film shot in a French training centre in 1966. The focus will be on couples' experiences of continuing education. In the film (male) participants speak about their evening classes in the framework of “work superior promotion” programmes. They speak in particular about the impact of their training on their married and family life; three participants are interviewed in the company of their spouse. The analysis of this film seeks to highlight the following: - the issue of impacts on adult learning on couples was taken into account in the mid-sixties and considered as important enough to be shown in a film which aimed was the training of the trainers: what was its meaning for educational courses providers and trainers, what lessons should to be learnt from it? - the ways couples acknowledged, beyond the lack of time for marital or family life, how the experience in a training course shifted relations within spouses due to the insights of new knowledge acquired during the course. This analysis will be situated with respect to the development of ideas concerning “Social promotion” in France and the ways these ideas were linked to the evolution of the status of women (conjugal rights, autonomy and work) and their place within policies of social promotion. This paper will also stress the use of a film as an archive: what sort of evidence and questions does this sort of historical source make available? What new approaches to the history of education does it allow?

Discourse and image analysis. Source: a documentary film considered as an archive.

Beyond the produced speech, this film provides rich information on the cultural and social context. Since the sixties, ways of thinking adult education and promotion has changed from collective to individual. In this film the collective conception of promotion is narrowed to the couple or the family. After 1968 in France, mentalities and the society changed. The look at women’s work was modified. Women also became possible learners of promotion programmes. And yet, the question raised in the film is not so absurd if we don’t consider the role distribution between husbands and wives. It puts forward the issue of the impact of a learning process - as changing one’s relationship to knowledge (or way of knowing) - on couple relations.