The GENERAL CONTEXT of such use is:
keeping 'the dregs of society' out of school by 'honest means': The French educational system, which, in its traditional form demanded and obtained unchallengeable verdicts expressing an always univocal hierarchy (even when concealed under a set of interlocking hierarchies) contrasts with systems like the American university, which provides for the institutional resolution of the tensions resulting from the disparity between the aspirations it helps to instill and the social means of realizing them. If one considers the limiting case, one imagines universities which, accepting quasi-explicitly their role as institutions of symbolic government, would equip themselves with all the institutionalized instruments (tests, plus a system of branch lines and sidings making up a university subtly hierarchized under the guise of diversity) and specialized personnel (psychologists, psychiatrists, guidance counselors, psychoanalysts) required for the discreet, friendly manipulation of those whom the institution condemns, excludes or relegates. This academic Utopia enables it to be seen that 'rationalization' of the technical and institutional tools for exclusion, channelling, and inculcation of acquiescence in channelling and exclusion, would enable the school system to fulfill more efficiently, because more irreproachably, the functions it performs today when it selects and, by concealing the principles of its selection (no 'working classes' allowed, etc.), wins acquiescence in that selection and in the principles underlying it (nobility/aristocracy versus working classes).