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Who needs a United Nations school? A struggle between international officials and education specialists, New York, 1946–1949

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Abstract

What are the origins of international schools? Authors in the fields of education and institutional history often point to the “need” of an invisible group of parents. This need, and the “demand” these schools claim to fulfill, haunt common discourse. From a historical and sociological viewpoint, however, these are precisely the factors that require explanation. This article draws on several archival sources to analyze competing projects and visions of the United Nations International School in New York and to thus reconstruct its origins. The analysis shows that the founders of this school were neither an established occupational group of international civil servants nor an organized group of parents. On the contrary, high-level officials mobilized around the cause of a United Nations school in their quest for other status claims. A historical sociology of international education can therefore effectively replace the myth of origins, providing a better understanding of international civil servants as a social group.

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Correspondence to Leonora Dugonjić.

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This article was originally written in French. Special thanks go to Mark Johnson for his careful English translation; and to Camille Fauroux, Rita Hofstetter, Damiano Matasci, Francine Muel-Dreyfus, Véra Nikolski, Raphaëlle Richard de Latour and Gisèle Sapiro, for their comments and suggestions. Thanks also to Douglas Deane, for allowing me to access his private archives, and to the archivists at the International School of Geneva, especially Michael Knight, and the United Nations Archives in New York. The article is based on a chapter of my dissertation (Dugonjić 2014a), which was subsidized by the Swiss National Fund for Scientific Research (FNS Project No. 100014_126966).

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Dugonjić, L. Who needs a United Nations school? A struggle between international officials and education specialists, New York, 1946–1949. Prospects 45, 127–140 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-015-9347-0

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