| Summary: | In France, the word éducateurs refers to social workers involved in youth work and/or social care work. If éducateur’s professionality is a construct, should it not depend on the historical circumstances of its emergence and development, i.e. welfare state progress, and thus be seriously threatened when welfare ideology is questionned ? Unless this professionnality should proceed from a pure historical contingency... Introduced in the post-war period with the project of socalizing and emancipating individuals amalgamated under the label of “maladjusted”, éducateur’s professionality has been defined through a technicist discourse, provided by social sciences contributions. In the seventies, the mission and role of éducateurs were challenged by a discourse focused on person’s rights, autonony and self fulfilment.Despite ruptures (due to sensitiveness to technical progress or to crisis of values), consistency can be found from the 50s to the 80s in éducateur’s mainstream model (a curative and psychotherapeutic model) ; these decades shared the same regime of historicity, made of belief in unlimited social progress and hope of social changes. Nowadays absence of projection in the future would echo the end of this model.An analysis of historicity consist here in assessing the professionals’ relationship with temporality, and their way of considering the articulation of the present with the future and with the past.Historicity and the éducateur’s professionality must also be linked to account for a construct issuing from permanent but renewed themes, significantly specifying the professional intervention of éducateurs - problematics of “éducateur’s personality”, or of “hic et nunc” - to answer the questions raised within youth and/or social care work : relation to oneself, to the other and to reality.Understanding the éducateur’s professionality through historicity allows keeping on bringing together the actual questions, asked by professionals at work, the questions from which the profession was built, and the variability of answers. From the historicity point of view, speaking of the éducateur’s professionality is a way to represent specific questionings about education on the social scene.
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