General Introduction

Abstract

First, we show that the IBE, founded in 1925, can be considered as a matrix of educational internationalism. It became the first intergovernmental institution in education in 1929, and under the aegis of Piaget, it developed a more and more resolutely universal and universalist ambition. This orientation of the IBE sets the point of view adopted for the analysis of its history.

We then forge theoretical tools based on the ongoing debate on the universal in order to proceed to a critical sociogenesis of the IBE’s ambitions and achievements within its relational network and the educational context of the twentieth century and we formulate our research questions.

We finally present the five parts which make up the book, each representing a particular point of view on the IBE’s history, written thanks to the rich archival heritage which is briefly described. A brief conclusion highlights some contradictions still present today which are then taken up in our general conclusion.

The whole world puts its hope in education. It needs an energetic, active, enterprising educational organisation, able to penetrate everywhere, to put everything to work, to make the most of everything. If we do not become that organisation in a short time, another one, or others, will be created and we will have no reason to exist. It would undoubtedly only be half bad if these organisations presented the same guarantees of objectivity and of scientific serenity as the IBE, which lives in the atmosphere of pure scientific idealism of the J. J. Rousseau Institute, of political and religious neutrality which is that of the Swiss Confederation, and the advanced international spirit of Geneva. But this would not be the case, because it is impossible to find these three conditions combined elsewhere. (Marie Butts, Secretary General, Report to the Council of IBE, 21.10.1927, p. 2)¹

At the end of the Great War, the whole world would confer on education a redeeming mission. This was obvious to the Secretary General of the International Bureau of Education (IBE), who defended with conviction—here in 1927—the uniqueness of the Bureau that the Institut Rousseau² had just set up in Geneva (1925). According to Marie Butts, only that particular Bureau could provide all the guarantees of credibility and legitimacy required of such a “sanctuary”³: strict objectivity, scientific serenity, political and religious neutrality, and an advanced international spirit.

The energetic tone of the above quotation in fact reflects the drama that was then unfolding, and which distressed Butts, who felt that if the enterprise was not better supported and directed, it would soon go under. A few months earlier, she had compared the IBE to “a budding giant” whose “growth is a little frightening […] the time has come to make a serious effort to provide our Bureau with the financial means that are absolutely essential for its survival”.⁴ Less than two years after its creation was proclaimed loud and clear to the world, the IBE was actually on the verge of collapse.

However, we know in retrospect that the Bureau still exists today, and this book is being published in the effervescent context of preparations for its centenary, which will be celebrated in 2025: a longevity that few intergovernmental organisations created during the inter-war period have been able to achieve, with the notable exception of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and its Bureau, whom the IBE had taken as model.⁵ How, under what conditions and at what cost did this small institution of 1925, which effectively intended to merge its destiny with that of humanity, master the growth of this “budding giant” and deploy its potentialities? Have its universalist ambitions and flagship principles been maintained, and have they been able to guide its activities and productions? Such issues are among the main questions to which this book intends to provide an answer.

This introduction begins with our point of departure, namely that the IBE of the first part of the twentieth century can be seen as a matrix of educational internationalism. If we widen our time frame here, it is the resolutely universal and universalist ambition of the IBE that comes to the fore, under the aegis of Piaget, when the institution becomes intergovernmental. Hence the title of this book, which also sets out the main theme. We then briefly situate ourselves in the intense debate concerning the universal, and forge the indispensable tools for developing this critical sociogenesis of the IBE’s ambitions and achievements within its relational network and the educational context of the twentieth century. We continue with a presentation of our problematic, a description of the approaches and contents of each of the five parts, and a presentation of the rich archival heritage on which our investigation is based. This introduction concludes with a few remarks designed to highlight contradictions that are still present today, and which we will take up again in our conclusion, since our research helps to shed new light on them.

The IBE: A Matrix for Educational Internationalism

Our investigation of the sociogenesis of the IBE in the dense web of international organisations (IGOs and INGOs) of the first half of the twentieth century leads us to assert that this Bureau constituted a matrix of educational internationalism,⁶ with the universal in mind. Education is a nodal facet of the “cultural internationalism” conceptualised by Iriye (1997) which demonstrates the extent to which cultural phenomena—representations, values, knowledge, literature and the arts—play a central role in the process of internationalisation, which intensified in the nineteenth century, to become a veritable tidal wave during the first half of the twentieth century (Herren, 2009; Sluga, 2013). The adjective “international” plus the suffix “-ism” depicts this process as a cause to be embraced, an imperative to be implemented, an objective to be achieved. In our view, it can be interpreted as an internationalisation that becomes conscious of itself.⁷ Referring to works describing the sociogenesis of internationalism,⁸ we use the term “educational internationalism”⁹ to designate the convictions and achievements of a myriad of actors, individual and collective, private and public, who were convinced of the need to apply the methods of international collaboration to the field of education in order to pacify the world. The IBE would attempt to be the epicentre of this, by setting itself up as an international rallying point.

During the immediate post-war decade, the IBE was indeed a significant emblem of the mobilising power of civil society, as it strove to stand out as a federating body for international associations that aspired to build universal peace through education. Since 1929, set up as an independent intergovernmental organisation, the first in the field of education, it had been striving for the universality of its state partners, in order to improve education systems with them. The internationalism of which it claimed to be a part aimed to work on a global scale to universalise access to education and to define universalisable teaching methods: an educational internationalism of which it can be considered to be the matrix. It would be a matrix through the new modes of collaboration and exchange that the Bureau established: the objectivity and neutrality its founders included in the statutes of the Bureau from the outset constituted for them the tools for international action on education systems, the preserve of nations. Its partners thus profiled the IBE as an intergovernmental centre for comparative education, the first IO specializing in the description and comparative analysis of public school systems. It was in this capacity that from 1947 onwards the Bureau collaborated with UNESCO, for which it is considered a precursor. It was also a matrix in defining, studying and discussing the causes on its agenda: addressing a wide range of problems deemed crucial to the world’s educational progress, it endeavoured to construct what its leaders called a charter of “world aspirations for public education”. In its own way, it inaugurated what we now call the global education agenda.¹⁰

An Increasingly Universal Orientation

As we have said, the common thread running through this book is the IBE’s universal ambition. Perceived and declared right from its foundation (1925), this became its primary aim once it was elevated to the status of an intergovernmental organization. The collaboration with UNESCO, inaugurated in the early days of the institution, was intended to bring it closer to this goal.

Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, the number and profile of the countries participating in the IBE’s activities became more diversified to include most parts of the globe, thus bringing it closer to the ideal of universality. What interests us in this context is to understand how these partners, brought together for the “supreme good of childhood”, which was supposed to free them from all frontiers and discord, positioned themselves in relation to each other when they were confronted with particularly sensitive problems. We examine especially the impact of the Cold War and of decolonisation in terms of the universalist ideals in force, also appropriated by newly independent countries to make their own voices heard. We focus here on the forty years during which Jean Piaget was the director (1929–1968) and the driving force behind the International Conferences on Public Education (ICPEs), which were organised annually in order to apply the methods of international collaboration to the field of education. We examine how Piaget drew on his universalist theories of child development and the construction of intelligence as guidelines for the pedagogical surveys and positions of the IBE and how, under his leadership, the IBE positioned itself axiologically.¹¹ We also highlight how, together with Rosselló (Deputy Director), Piaget conceptualised the modus operandi of the ICPEs, which were designed to allow “the ascension from the individual to the universal” as well as the way in which he assumed his role as a diplomat of educational internationalism, including during the critical phases of the exacerbation of nationalisms and, later, those of the geopolitical reconfigurations of the world.

Throughout the twentieth century, the orientation of the IBE towards the universal became thus more explicit and served as a flag-bearer for its designers. This is particularly evident in the quest for universality of governmental actors who contributed to the enterprise, that is, ministries of education around the world. It can also be seen in the development of a modus operandi that was supposed to respect the principles of reciprocity and decentralisation in order to guarantee equitable exchanges which, from the IBE’s perspective, was a condition for the construction of the universal. It was simultaneously reflected in the desire to define universalisable pedagogical principles and to promote universal access to education. It is also significant that it was to Piaget, Director of the IBE and Interim Director of the UNESCO education department, that this UN agency entrusted the task of commenting on Article 26 of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, dedicated to the right to education.¹²

Universal/Universality: Conceptual Tools for an Investigation

The IBE was thereby part of the universalist discourse¹³ of the time which concerned both the epistemic sphere and its potential for knowledge, and the ethical sphere linked to the question of values, such as peace, justice, health and freedom, to mention just a few of the IO’s flagship ideals at the time. Since the IBE’s quest for legitimacy in the dense network of other bodies with the same universal aims is examined here in the light of its universalist ambitions, we will briefly situate ourselves in recent historiography on this subject. These universalist discourses have been the subject of criticism in major political debates, to the extent that some have spoken of a “new quarrel”.¹⁴ This will allow us to introduce some concepts that will guide us in our investigations.

Various analyses have shown that, in addition to the just and noble causes they are supposed to promote, claims to universality have also turned out to be weapons of oppression and discrimination of peoples, serving even as a pretext for exploitation and imperialist domination under the guise of a civilising mission that justified colonialism.¹⁵ This overarching universalism (Merleau-Ponty, 1960, p. 75)—of which human rights would constitute a modality—was also analysed by some as the result of a narrative, a product of the dominant historicism (Chakrabarty, 2009), which made Europe the place where the benefits of human progress had emerged and were erected as universal: European exceptionalism would embody the universalism that the rest of the world was supposed to follow (Diagne, 2018, p. 71), in other words what Bourdieu (1992) once called the “imperialism of the universal”.

However, the very notion of the universal is rarely questioned on its merits, and the interpretations that critics provide of it diverge. Indeed, the universal is an “essentially contested” notion.¹⁶ This manifests itself in the antinomies that appear in the discussions devoted to it. Balibar identifies and explores three of them which will serve as a compass in our analysis of the IBE.¹⁷ The most well-known is that between the vertical or overarching universal, on the one hand, and the lateral universal enriched by experience of the other. The second one is between the extensive universal which aims first to expand itself and the intensive universal which operates by the force of principle or emulation. The third between the abstract universal which functions by subtracting particularities (Kant’s categorical imperative or, essentially, human rights) and the concrete universal with the differences or particularities becoming components of the universal, in the sense of a totality. Any discussion of the concept of universal would lead to one positioning oneself in the contradictory field described by these paradoxes.

The discussion around these antinomies itself demonstrates that it is not so much a question of abandoning the concept of the universal in favour of particularism,¹⁸ as of enriching it according to socio-historical evolutions. Diagne writes in particular:

The plural that Bandung celebrates is not directed against the universal. On the contrary, it is its promise. That of a universal which is not an imperial imposition, but the inscription of the plural of the world on a common horizon. (2021, p. 150)¹⁹

Critical approaches assert the possibility of the construction of another type of universal, which is currently the subject of much debate.²⁰ We have identified two common characteristics which will also guide our thinking on the IBE’s history.²¹ First, the universal is defined as the product of a ceaseless construction, as a process through which particularities, differences and nuances can be incorporated into the universal itself. To put it another way: what is universal is not the product of an abstract essence, but is derived from what is tirelessly constructed through the circulation of practices, knowledge, communication and understanding of particularities. Second, this implies forms of interaction that are discursive and linked to language. In this context, two approaches are adopted: that of dialogue-deliberation, based on argumentation and reasoning, an ideal that often refers to Habermas (see in particular 1983); and that of translation, a necessity arising from the fact that differences are fixed in humanity’s multiplicity of languages and cultures, which in fact constitute a “multiversum” and which make possible mutual appropriation and transformation.²² It seems to us that it is possible to link these approaches to the concept of “multiversum” that Bloch once proposed in his critique of the unilateral notion of progress, of which overarching universalism is one of the most obvious incarnations:

The notion of progress does not tolerate “cultural circles” in which time is nailed to space in a reactionary manner but, instead of uniqueness, it needs a broad, elastic and fully dynamic multiversum, a permanent and often entangled counterpoint of historical voices. Thus, in order to do justice to the immense extra-European material, it is no longer possible to work in a unilinear way, no longer without bulges in the series, no longer without a new, complicated temporal multiplicity. (Bloch, 1956/1970, p. 38 [our translation])

The universal as a process of construction thus implies a multiversum.

Our Theme: The Universal and the IBE—Ambitions, Limits and Contradictions

We have made the heuristic choice of taking the “essentially contested” concept of “universal” and its derivatives “universality, universalisability, universalising”, as an analytical thread, since, as we stated above, it was consubstantial to the discourse and intentions of those contemporary actors themselves,²³ and with the IBE Secretariat in the first place, including its director, Piaget. In this regard, we will examine how the IBE positioned itself, in its daily functioning, when faced with different possible manifestations of the universal: to take up the antinomies pointed out, between the vertical universal versus the lateral, abstract versus concrete, extensive versus intensive. More specifically, how did the IBE relate to the overarching universalism that functioned as the dominant ideology with its corollary of a civilising mission? To what extent did it succeed in envisaging other modalities of constructing the universal that could come close to the conceptions being discussed and that are well summarised by the term multiversum? Can we identify any specific features of the role, mandate and positioning of the IBE in the dense network of international bodies making education their focus? In particular, we will explore the following questions: What role did the figure of Piaget and his psychopedagogical theory play in this construction, and how did he, together with his deputy director, the comparatist Pedro Rosselló, and the staff of the IBE, develop tools capable of meeting (or failing to meet) this universalist challenge? Would the application of the IBE’s principles of neutrality and objectivity, if at all effective, enable it to avoid the pitfalls identified, taking it for granted that they form the basis of exchanges between protagonists with contrasting points of view? To what extent did the reconfigurations of the surrounding world, in particular the Cold War and above all the wave of decolonisation in the 1950s and 1960s, call into question the foundations of the IBE and require adjustments to the way it operated? What were the main thrusts of the “global education aspirations” concerning universal access to education and the universalisable principles developed by the IBE? Given its status as a matrix, might the IBE have been at the forefront of the development of a series of educational principles which would have contributed today to the establishment of an educational dogma by international education agencies? In fact, let us dare to go one step further: was it not precisely through its principles that the Bureau ran the risk of a vertical universalism: by not taking a position, ignoring, or even supporting practices and discourses that denied the universal; by generalising to humanity as a whole²⁴ objective results that might be particular and only valid in a specific context?

The universal, claimed by the IBE itself, was thus systematically subjected to questioning. It is thus a matter of observing the different manifestations that this notion could take in the concrete reality of daily action that unfolds in contexts marked by relationships of domination, contradictory positions, and liberation movements.

In answering these questions, the book makes its own contribution to the historiography of global governance in education, which has been developing over the last few years to complement the history of international organisations (IOs).²⁵ This fascinating research will now be enriched by the history of the IBE, considered at the time to be a predecessor of UNESCO: the IBE, the first intergovernmental organisation in education, a “specialised second-level institution” affiliated to UNESCO under the aegis of a world-renowned psychologist, Piaget, who played a significant role on UNESCO’s Executive Committee and as interim director of the organisation’s education department.

Structure of the Book: Five Complementary Points of View

We thus see the IBE as a privileged observatory for identifying the conditions and convictions that led the designers of this small IO to take on the mission of contributing to the universalisation of access to education, by constructing pedagogical methods deemed universalisable, a universality that would be guaranteed by associating with the universality of the world’s educational authorities. Our aim is to highlight their ambitions and achievements, the struggles and disputes that punctuated their daily lives, the contradictions they encountered and the ways in which they strove to overcome them in order to ensure the credibility and efficiency of their institution and the causes they espoused.

To do this, we have adopted five complementary points of view which have structured our work, varying the scales and focal points of the analysis.

A processual analysis of the building and restructuring of the IBE in its context is carried out in Part I of this book. We examine how the small Institut Rousseau mobilised to create the IBE (1925), transforming it into an intergovernmental education agency (1929), which joined forces with UNESCO (1947) in order to concretise what the UN body now calls the “world education agenda”.

The management of its relational system, oriented by a principle of universality, was at the heart of the concerns of the IBE’s designers and serves as a common thread in our analysis of the different regimes that were negotiated, experimented with, reorganised and institutionalised. At the same time, we highlight the multiple temporalities of this construction, with each of the reconfigurations and statutory decisions accompanying, supporting and stabilising the daily orientations and practices, which were constantly changing in order to guarantee the viability and legitimacy of the institution in the face of institutional and geopolitical changes in the surrounding world.

Here we diversify the scales of analysis, in order to understand what was lived and done on a day-to-day basis in the Bureau’s small office, what was stated and negotiated in official meetings, and what was printed and circulated between bodies and beyond institutional and national borders. This also allows us to identify the possible discrepancies between global aspirations for perpetual peace and the objective conditions of exhausting experiences, where the daily work at the IBE had as its limited horizon a tiny office in which piles of complex files were managed by a small core of energetic but overworked internationalists.

How did the designers and spokespersons of the IBE manage to hold the reins of this “giant” whose growth both alarmed and excited them? What tools and mechanisms did they use to implement their ambitious programme? Under what conditions did they manage to overcome the turmoil of the war, to gain recognition from the new “World Authority for Education” that was UNESCO, and then to defy the antagonisms of the Cold War and the multiplicity of international institutions that arrogated prerogatives in the field of education and made it a vector of development?

Part II is complementary: it adopts the point of view of a social and conceptual (micro-) history in order to elucidate the principles and axiological positions that underpinned the commitment of the IBE’s project leaders. We try to understand where the members of the IBE Secretariat – including its directors – and the main bodies and personalities that defined its orientations were positioned and what they aimed to achieve.

The challenge is to determine how these actors, whose individual and collective portraits are drawn here, handled their rigorously scientific postures and their resolutely reformist commitments, making themselves also the standard-bearers of the new education and active methods; how they tried to position themselves in the face of the new intergovernmental institutions which, from one post-war period to the next, coveted childhood and education in order to manage the future of the planet. It is these competitions and rivalries—the sometimes disconcerting ostracism that ensued—but also the internal dissensions and embarrassing suspicions which we are interested in identifying in order to determine how these apparent obstacles became a springboard for action, leading the IBE spokespersons to constantly clarify their position.

We attempt here to understand the content and to identify possible developments that followed, in order to highlight what, in the IBE’s principles of action, persisted over the decades or was reconfigured in order to avoid ambiguities, resistance and contradictions. How were the individual and collective convictions, ideological positions and value systems of IBE leaders expressed and how did they evolve in a world where education became the object of intergovernmental rivalries and cultural antagonisms between nations and empires? What were the theoretical underpinnings developed by the members of the IBE Secretariat—Piaget in particular—to define the IBE’s central axiom: the “ascent from the individual to the universal”? This dialectic between the differential and the universal—between the abstract and the concrete universal one might also say—gives rise to reflection, and here it leads once more to a clarification of the IBE’s positioning, in concertation with its partners.

The first two parts of the book contextualise the sociogenesis of the IBE and its axiological principles, going back to the beginning of the twentieth century and covering, downstream, the last years during which the institution remained independent. They set the institutional and conceptual scene of the IBE in its relational network. The next three parts focus on the forty years of the IBE under the stewardship of Piaget and more particularly on the period when the “IBE spirit” and its modus operandi were consolidated around the annual International Conferences on Public Education (ICPEs), namely between 1934 and 1968. The last period, the 1960s, can be considered as its climax marked by a modus operandi that its very success made inoperative. This is what we will show.

Part III focuses on the ICPEs which were the trademark of the IBE since 1934; UNESCO was associated with the organisation of these since 1947, demonstrating the importance attached to these conferences at the time. How could this new “intergovernmental world forum for education”²⁶ be institutionalised by bringing together nation states jealous of their educational prerogatives? But conversely, how could an organisation claim to be completely politically neutral and strictly scientific, when its main state partners aspired to have their national school policies endorsed? In this part, we propose to define the conceptual and pragmatic contours of the “modus operandi” of the aforementioned conferences, conceived jointly by the two heads of the IBE, Piaget and his deputy director Rosselló, by dissecting their scenography, which was also evolving, as well as the theorisation which formed the basis of it. We are deepening a hypothesis, previously outlined (Hofstetter & Schneuwly, 2023), namely that it might be possible to find its sociogenesis by going back to the first Piagetian theorisations concerning the development and construction of the child’s intelligence. Could the principles of decentring and reciprocity not be transposed from the pedagogical sphere to the intergovernmental scene? This seems to be the mainspring of Piaget’s investment in the IBE and its ICPEs. With the comparatist Rosselló, the institution was built as they went along, its creation being original in that it contributed to the foundation of comparative education, both as an academic discipline and as a scientific method. It was hoped that international comparative surveys would provide the data to be documented and then guide what they call the “global march of education”, drawing on local and national experiences to collectively define recommendations for improving education worldwide. These recommendations would be all the more binding since they would be collegially defined and freely agreed upon and reappropriated: they would function both as extensive universals, aimed at the whole world, as well as intensive universals, with emulation often invoked as a mechanism for transformation.

A utopia? A fiction? But how could such a modus operandi be put forward, when the world was on fire, when the intergovernmental institutions of the first half of the twentieth century were mostly doomed to disappear, to be replaced by the powerful United Nations and its numerous specialized organisations; and when in education its UNESCO takes a central place, then, more and more, economic organisations like OECD and World Bank investing which favour resolutely more constraining mechanisms of governance?

Changing scale, in Part IV we move on to analyse the relationships that the IBE maintained with different countries and educational authorities around the world to encourage them to participate in its activities and to manage them collectively. We analyse how the IBE implemented its theoretical principles of action and its modus operandi on a day-to-day basis. The transnational perspective is of particular importance here, as is the contribution of political science in identifying the contrasting forms of the relationship between politics and education in a self-proclaimed neutral and independent intergovernmental body. While the IBE claimed to be universal, not only in numerical terms but also in terms of equity of treatment and relations with its state partners, we are interested here in questioning the likely obstacles encountered, the possible compromises accepted, the inevitable differentiations established, and the transformations chosen or undergone to, depending on the interlocutors as well as on geopolitical developments.

We ask ourselves if the very aim of universality does not potentially contain its own contradictions: was the postulated impartiality tenable in the face of the rise of ideologies that were contrary to the democratic principles defended by the IBE and which, moreover, interfered in its sphere? Was it still tenable when the voices and demands of long-oppressed peoples erupted and firmly raised the question of the political basis of education, as revealed by the expansionist civilising arguments carried by the myth of development imposed by the Western empires? How did global political developments—authoritarianism, the Cold War, the emancipation of colonies—interfere with the goal of universality? Did these developments collide with the universal principles of action on which the IBE was based, thereby making it difficult to situate oneself between vertical and lateral universality?

This part thus allows us to reflect further on the way in which representatives of education on the one hand and politics on the other²⁷ negotiated their reciprocal relations. In doing so, we will try to identify how the IBE partners played the game—or not—of depoliticising intergovernmental consultations on education; simultaneously we will try to see how socially relevant educational issues were exposed to controversies and divisions influenced by the geopolitical context.

In Part V, we focus on the causes defended by IBE partners, and more specifically on the general guidelines and principles that they believed could be universalised through their ICPEs. Through content analysis of the thematic surveys, the results and discussions of which were published in large volumes leading to recommendations that were disseminated worldwide, the aim is to identify which causes were favoured and in what form they were translated into recommendations of universal value. This involves closely observing the evolution of the themes and positions of the IBE’s protagonists in international surveys and forums, placing them in the contexts in which they were voiced. Embracing the systematic analysis of the sixty-five surveys²⁸ which led to the nineteen ICPEs, set up between 1934 and 1968 (jointly with UNESCO from 1947 onwards), we are thus able to present the major strengths of the causes favoured by the IBE: first and foremost, universal access to the fullest possible education in order to preserve peace and international understanding. This presupposes both a broad school culture and qualified and recognised teachers.

We have chosen to examine the causes officially defined by the IBE’s bodies and partners, in the order of our presentation: school content and culture, teacher training and working conditions, equal access to schooling and improvement of education systems. However, at the same time, we have also decided to take on board the cross-cutting issues that imposed themselves through their acuteness and which brought the protagonists face to face with important contradictions: beyond the beautiful and good causes supposedly common to all the world’s educational authorities, how were gender and race discrimination, as well as the asymmetries between the countries of the North and the South, and between the West and the East, dealt with—stated, denounced, masked or silenced?

Will our analysis allow us to better understand how likely it would be that the targeted abstract and general universal would run into concrete contradictions due to the fact, perhaps, that it does not take sufficiently into account the historically created conditions in which the principles must be realized?²⁹ This is what we are aiming at.

Besides this main text, we offer the reader two other ways to know parts of the IBE’s history. Short inserts,³⁰ distributed throughout the book, shed some light on particular aspects of the context in which it emerged and worked, or they focus, as through a magnifying glass, on details of its functioning and reasoning. Images and their captions illustrate each chapter: they can be read as a form of visual history of the IBE through photographs but also copies of texts and manuscripts whose significance is explained in the short texts that accompany them.

Exploiting Exceptional Documentary Heritage

Establishing the history of the IBE first of all required the identification of the sources that make it possible to gain intimate knowledge of its evolution and the analytical and critical interpretation that is then proposed.³¹ Our investigations were inaugurated at the Fondation Archives Institut J.-J. Rousseau, the institute that created the “first” IBE as a corporate association (1925–1929). They led us to the IBE’s Documentation Centre, which still houses the Bureau’s archival heritage in Geneva. This archive is particularly rich. Indeed, the concern for documentation—which is rooted in the IBE’s founders’ internationalist and encyclopaedic, pacifist and universalist convictions—led them, from the dawn of the twentieth century, to gather all the knowledge available in the world on childhood and education: to locate, classify, discuss, enrich and make it accessible to all, convinced as they were that universal access to knowledge and culture is a prerequisite for peace in the world. This documentary frenzy and this heritage culture were also useful for them to achieve and then establish their legitimacy, in order to prove their originality and their expertise and also to be part of history, to make history and to embody it.

Thus, in the voluminous archive preserved by the IBE³² we scoured the following resources to conduct our research: a wealth of books, journals, educational collections, and reports—in a variety of languages—that the IBE had acquired to document the evolution of education around the world; a host of responses to IBE surveys on educational reform from around the world documenting the critical issues that its leaders and partners sought to address; innumerable fact sheets prepared and translated for and by the International Conferences on Public Education, ICPEs, which were one of the original features of the IBE; and finally, an infinite variety of bibliographies, newsletters, and analytical summaries, with a view to guiding this global march.³³

We did not confine ourselves to official speeches alone, but we examined and cross-referenced a variety of sources—diaries, reports and minutes, personal correspondence, iconographic documents—with a view to capturing the effervescence of this internationalism, which was youthful in terms of both its novelty and its target population: in the final analysis, the new generations were the reference horizon for their activities. This diversity of sources has enabled us to grasp what was thought and played out on a daily basis within the IBE secretariat; to follow, day after day, the reflections and negotiations of the individuals and committees that created and reconfigured the institution over the decades. This has also allowed us to identify “from below”, right down to the work table of the secretaries and their directors, how the IBE experimented with any mechanism before it was formalised, reproducing its constructivist approach to education and science in many of its other activities, even administrative and diplomatic ones.

We have adopted the same methodological considerations as Kott (2021, p. 11), who stresses the “bulwark [that the official discourse may constitute] that hides from the outside world the contradictions that work” in the IOs, inviting us to carefully study the internal non-promotional documents in order to gain access to the multiplicity of divergent interests and discordant voices of which these agencies are made. We have tried to uncover the differences of opinion within the institution itself, but also the agreements that were reached, however difficult to reach, to express themselves with a unanimous voice when the members of the IBE had to represent their institution on official stages. As contemporaries did, we have used the singular in these cases, personifying in a sense the IBE, especially since the prosopographical analysis has shown that its main representatives recognise themselves in similar profiles, which are certainly the origin of their common investment in this enterprise and its causes.

It was at the majestic desk once occupied by Piaget when he was head of the IBE that we ourselves read the personal letters, as incisive as they were diplomatic, from the directors Pierre Bovet and then Piaget and Rosselló to their colleagues or competitors; the crisp and unvarnished reports of Secretary General Butts, as she rubbed shoulders with the so-called Peacemakers and Leaders of the World in the countless committees, commissions and congresses she attended, or as she drank tea and discussed strategy with their ingenious and often influential secretaries in the twilight following those ceremonial occasions.

Obviously, basing oneself on the archives of an institution that sees itself as the epicentre requires a certain amount of distance in order to avoid taking at face value the discourse that it has about itself. In doing so, it is necessary to contrast this discourse with that of other bodies, in order to better assess its audience; an audience that is certainly very small if we stick to the sources collected in the institutions that the IBE focused on: The International Labour Office (ILO), the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC) and the other organs of the Organisation of Intellectual Cooperation (OIC), the Liaison committee of the major international associations, and of course the League of Nations (LoN) and its bodies, then UNESCO and even the UN. Among the associations belonging to the IBE’s militant relational network, we have noted in particular the International Congress of Moral Education (ICEM), the New Education Fellowship (NEF), the teacher association of French speaking Switzerland the Société pédagogique romande (SPR), and the World Federation of Education Associations (WFEA),³⁴ whose archives also drew our attention. We have thus tried to interpret the less complimentary, even downright suspicious positions, as well as the silences in certain archives, in order to weigh up the role of the IBE and not simply to echo legitimising institutional rhetoric.

In View of a Conclusion

Our analyses show a body of concepts and values that is interesting to analyse as a whole in the light of present-day discussions and also taking into account the contradictions they contain, the negotiations they imply, the limits they entail and the compromises they engender:

• the particular modalities of a “depoliticisation”, of an “apoliticism”, today widely questioned and criticised, adopted by international organisations;

• the strongly Eurocentric educational internationalism, including its new education orientation and its individualising presuppositions, and the possible effects of this orientation in the international bodies that extend the work of the IBE as a matrix of such bodies;

• the possibility and the limits of defining universal orientations for education—the “global aspirations in education”—in the light of the constitutive antinomies of the universal and the universality, in connection also, more generally, with the idea of progress and development;

• the question of the conditions for the construction of a “multiversum” in the field of education, which is perhaps possible, following in the line of the IBE, thanks to the idea of reciprocity but without ruling out from the start the contradiction and the political.

The IBE as international institution, unique in its constancy and longevity, precisely offers the possibility for examining these issues that are still relevant. It is by no means about bringing this discussion to an end, but only of outlining the questions that it opens up and that we will take up in conclusion (Image 1.1).

Image 1.1

The emblem of the IBE. A vignette drawn by children of the Bakulé school in Prague, dedicated to street and to handicapped children, famous for its children’s choir. It appeared on countless publications, newsletters and correspondence. (© AIJJR)