This paper proposes to question the normative issues related to the variety of schooling choices for families in Djibouti. This country of the Horn of Africa is used as an example to illustrate the strategies in place to reduce and overcome or to explain the cultural, social, economical and ethnic gap between educational standards placed as universal (represented by public secular schools and catholic schools) and traditional ones (which are, in this particular context, Qu’ranic schools and madrasa). The inquiry first places historically the Western-style school (private catholic and public) front to its colonization legacy and then relates it to the traditional and oriental mode of education (coranic schools and madrasa), which coexist. This allows making a preliminary analysis of the hierarchical nature of the existing knowledge. This is followed by an analysis of the discourses of the principal actors involved which are teachers, parents, heads of school, pupils and early school leavers from the four types of schools identified in the school market. 

The analysis should highlight the divergence and convergence areas through the analysis of the discourse of the actors while explaining their schooling choices between catholic, secular or muslim schools. These areas of proximity and distance between the different school models are apprehended through the standards also referred in their programs, their funding patterns and the pedagogical methods involved. The most obvious distance zone refers to the school final purposes (qualifying or spiritual, aiming social, cultural or/and economic integration), a distance represented by the Muslim religious dogma governing the state and the society living with secularism existing in the public schools. Placing into perspective the guidelines set by international educational policies with specific contextual elements of the field research, allows to capture the historical connection of the models involved, while understanding their position face to international normative issues: does schooling in madrasa demonstrates a cultural resistance (Akkari , 2004), a refusal of the universalist discourse or/ and a process of differentiation ? Is madrasa used as a counter model ?

In order to answer to these questions, the analysis focuses on understanding the motivations of the actors for either educational option, regarded as the “translation” of their positions. The sociological paradigm of actor network (Callon and Latour, 2004) serves as a tool to confront the “translations” of the advantages rising from each kind of education. The analysis of what parental choices say in terms of expectations, aspirations and value given to the social and cultural integration (which is “being a good Muslim”) and economic integration (fit for being employed in the modern labour market) will be based on the theorical and conceptual frameworks of the sociology of action plans (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991).

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