The conceptual and theoretical backgrounds of the two leaders of the ICPEs, Rosselló and Piaget, were rooted in different fields, although they were both united in their firm belief in the primacy of scientificity. A field pedagogue who became an administrator and then a theoretician in educational sciences, Rosselló embodied comparative pedagogy and essentially referred back to this discipline; for his part, Piaget, as a developmental psychologist, geneticist of intelligence and sociologist of science, relied on his empirical and theoretical work on moral judgement and intellectual development. We assume that it was this dual scientific foundation and, above all, the ability to articulate the two approaches that underpinned the conceptual originality of the ICPEs’ modus operandi. Referring to the first years of the IBE’s work, in the 1959 ICPE Maheu, the acting Director-General of UNESCO, considered that “by its customs and methods, conferences, inquiries and reports of member countries [the IBE had] raised comparative education to the level of intergovernmental cooperation” (p. 37).Footnote 1 And this was its preliminary aim (Image 13.1).

Image 13.1
A photograph of Pedro Rossello and Robert Dottrens talking at tea.

Pedro Rosselló, deputy director of the IBE, specialist in comparative education, at the ICPE 1938, discussing with Robert Dottrens, co-director of the Institut Rousseau and responsible for the financial commission of the IBE for more than twenty years. (© IBE)

Full size image

Rosselló’s Dynamic Comparative Pedagogy

How does Rosselló theorise the comparative pedagogy he claims? Although he recognised militancy as legitimate—evoking the pacifist aims of the LoN and then of UNESCO—he defended the primacy of scientific objectivity. His writings (correspondence, reports, thesis, publications) contain elements that are the theoretical and methodological foundations of comparative pedagogy. He conceived it as a model for the functioning of both scientific research and intergovernmental collaboration. According to him, comparative education was the key instrument to enable both small and large powers to meet, to share their concerns, to benefit from the experiences of others and to develop together solutions to educational problems in the world, based on objective data collected in the school domain.

Claiming that he was wary of any kind of hegemony, Rosselló problematised the relation between the particular and the universal. He postulated that only by taking into account local data and their objective analysis could international and/or universal prospects be drawn up, and that these data could be translated into scientific theories (comparative education as a scientific discipline) or pedagogical recommendations (comparative education as an approach and as the result of work between governments). These theories and recommendations were non-binding and therefore should have been pertinent at international, national and regional levels, which presupposed that to be applied they would be adjusted to local contexts. Local characteristics even found themselves reinforced because of the fact that they could be made public and discussed or even valorised and appropriated by others.

According to Rosselló this was the main role of the IBE as he saw it and he shaped it in this way as a worldwide centre for comparative education, removing any spirit of caste or class. This was something which various members of the ICPEs highlighted, recognising the IBE explicitly as one of the top centres of comparative education in the world.Footnote 2 In Rosselló’s opinion, it was by basing itself on the surveys carried out by correspondents in the field who documented the pedagogical realities in countries that were eminent just as much as in those parts of the world that were somewhat “remote” that the IBE could provide a space that was free from any external interference from partner governments. He even declared that it was this autonomy, with regard to politics, which had allowed the IBE to work in an atmosphere that was quite different to that at the LoN where political negotiations and interferences would in fact have dominated. The same was true regarding the thematic surveys which led to the concerted composition of the recommendations that provided a synthesis of the directions likely to solve the issue in question, but without any interference in education policies.Footnote 3

Later on, when Rosselló would also be working in synergy with UNESCO,Footnote 4 he shored up his analyses of the contributions made by comparative education. He reckoned that this “science of educational realities”—and the term is not anodyne—has three main roles:

  • pedagogical documentation and information

  • education planning

  • sending experts out on missions.Footnote 5

In fact, for Rosselló (1960, 1963), comparative pedagogy was likely to supply the tools to test for better school planning.

He distinguished clearly between descriptive comparative education, as evidenced in the Yearbooks, from explanatory comparative pedagogy which, as he pointed out, was the most exciting for a comparatist, since it could provide the philosophical, historical, geographical, political and socio-economic causes of such or such a phenomenon. It was in this sense that he gradually tried to orientate the exchanges within the ICPEs.

This really was the direction that he championed during his time spent as deputy director of the IBE: Rosselló was determined to promote comparative pedagogy that was dynamic rather than static, shedding light on what changed and what was permanent in order for them to be understood. He thought that this was one of the greatest virtues and the originality of the Yearbooks since they offered a global observatory on the evolution of education over several decades.Footnote 6

For Rosselló (for instance ICPE, 1948, p. 110), comparative education deserved to feature prominently in training programmes for educators and administrators of the education world, since it guaranteed objective knowledge of the realities of that field, of its needs and of the possible and diverse solutions to problems that were identified. It also broadened the minds of these people by allowing them a glimpse of what was being thought and done on a global level, thereby favouring worldwide citizenship and a universal perspective. It also constituted, let us recall in this part dedicated to the modus operandi of the ICPEs, the functional conditions necessary for any intergovernmental cooperation. The issue at stake was pedagogical, ethical, functional and, above all, scientific (analytical and explanatory); as such, comparative education has been regarded as the first discipline to provide large-scale potentially objective data to the educational sciences (which in this respect is complementary to psychology, which focuses on individual data) (Image 13.2).

Image 13.2
A photograph of Jean Piaget and Pedro Rossello outdoors in leisure hours.

The IBE director Jean Piaget and the deputy director Pedro Rosselló were friends also in their private life (with their families) as this picture and many others show. (© AIJJR)

Full size image

Piaget’s Psychopedagogical Theories Transposed to the ICPEs

This section draws on an analysis conducted as part of the Archives Piaget lectures (Hofstetter & Schneuwly, 2022). See Xypas (1997) for an analysis of Piaget’s moral education.

Complementary to Rosselló’s comparative approaches, Piaget’s psychological theories also provided a conceptual basis for the modus operandi of the ICPEs, shaping both the modalities of intergovernmental exchanges and their aims. We have shown that Piaget combined the dual position of scholarly psychologist and diplomat of educational internationalism (Hofstetter & Schneuwly, 2022). In his scientific writings of the 1920s,Footnote 7 his theorisation of self-government—inherited from his colleagues at the Institut Rousseau, in particular Bovet, Claparède and Ferrière, and also by CousinetFootnote 8—demonstrated that collaboration allows access to a kind of “morality of thought”, an “internal solidarity”, that respects particular points of view, thereby testifying to an aptitude for reciprocity (Piaget, 1931a, p. 26).

For Piaget, what applied in the field of education would also apply in other fields, including that of international and intergovernmental cooperation. The Director of the IBE therefore invited the government delegates to adopt the same position: to work, to engage in dialogue, to cooperate and to place themselves in a dynamic of reciprocity in order to understand others and to learn from their experiences. A detailed analysis of the modus operandi set up in these ICPEs allows us to state that Piaget was experimenting with the methods of cooperation—teamwork—and self-government, which he had already shown favoured the passage from egocentrism to reciprocity in children, thereby allowing access to moral judgement, rationality and truth, all at the origin of intelligence. These are the same postures and virtues that Piaget endeavoured to transpose within the walls of these intergovernmental meetings.

Delegates—and, through them, states—were thus encouraged to come to an understanding of others, and, by doing so, to make this “ascent from the individual to the universal” (Piaget, 1931a, p. 26) which corresponds to the very processes of a child’s intellectual and moral development (Piaget, 1931a, p. 26). Why should it not be the same for adults? Such an ascent presupposes a reduction in this egocentrism, which is seen as the cause of abuses of power on the planet, as evidenced by nationalist, racist, chauvinist and imperialist excesses. For egocentrism, as Piaget demonstrated, reduces the possibilities of developing autonomous thought, a condition for access to full intellectual awareness and civic responsibility. Here too, what applies to the child applies to the adult, and what applies to the individual also applies to collective entities, in this case nations:

Any conquest of a wider horizon is counterbalanced by the resurgent mental inertia characteristic of egocentrism. This is the general and human explanation of the disorder that reigns in our minds with regard to internationalism. […] We have made absolutes of the very products of our efforts to co-ordinate, and the homelands we have constituted, by laboriously disciplining our egocentrism, find themselves resurrecting it by simply elevating it to the rank of a collective egocentrism, and all the more tyrannical for it. (Piaget, 1934, pp. 22–23)

This “ascent of the individual to the universal” echoes another “universality”,Footnote 9 a technical one, which was that of including all the countries in the world in the Conferences.Footnote 10 Their individual points of view (or more specifically, their “national” and “local” and “regional” perspectives), present in their diversity, would moreover make it possible, through reciprocity and mutual understanding, which are the basis of autonomous moral judgement, to construct yet another universality: that which presupposes the (re-)knowledge of each other’s points of view. This would be the IBE’s motto: “unity in diversity”:

The identity of concerns under the multiplicity of conditions; hence the impression of unity in diversity that emerged each time from the Conference and which could provide a motto for the Bureau itself in its wish to respect the point of view of everyone while coordinating the efforts of all. (Piaget, ICPE 1936, p. 31; our italics)

This “instrument” benefited from a powerful theoretical foundation which Piaget had already laid down at the first ICPE in 1934 and ceaselessly recalled so his partners in this enterprise might grasp its meaning and appropriate its principle:

This is our method, which is all about reciprocity: no attempt at standardisation, but mutual information on all the special issues raised by the reports. Delegates were struck by the atmosphere of cooperation and mutual understanding at the conference. (Director’s report 1934, p. 29)

Again the following year, Piaget specified: “these methods can be easily characterised in two words: objectivity and reciprocity; or, if you prefer, mutual information and reciprocal understanding, that is, the scientific method” (1935, p. 28). One cannot help but be struck by the vocabulary chosen in these passages, which bears a striking resemblance to that used in his theoretical work on moral judgement and solidarity: it is not a question of abandoning one’s own point of view, but of understanding that of the other. We can take note that in 1968 (pp. 31–44), these same writings by Piaget would be quoted, to highlight their fruitfulness in the education field as well as in defining the spirit and the way the ICPEs operated.

However, in the meantime, the world had changed, and many new international organisations had taken over the production of knowledge on educational issues, perceived as challenges to development and economic growth, and the OECD and the World Bank were among them. Their instruments, their technicality, their expertise and resources were much more extensive than those of the IBE, which had hardly changed since 1955 and especially the early 1960s. This may have been an original modus operandi in the 1930s, or even in the beginning of the 1950s, but it no longer seemed to meet international standards or those of educational sciences.Footnote 11

Insert 13.1 The Documentation Frenzy of the IBE: Work Below the Surface

The documentary mission of the IBE was constitutive of the internationalist ideal that drove its members. It was a matter of documenting what was happening at the local, regional and national levels in various cultural areas, in order to highlight innovative experiments, specific traditions and national mentalities. This would make for better knowledge and understanding of others, promoting international understanding and universal solidarity. This documentalist approach was considered to be a method at the cutting edge of scientific progress and characterised many other technical organisations. It was a furthering of the encyclopaedic ambition of the eighteenth century and of the cross-border connections between learned communities and militant associations of the nineteenth century: in itself, the dissemination of knowledge thanks to the emulation it made possible (which contained the idea of intensive universalism) would have an emancipatory and pacific tendency. Doing this, the IBE identified itself as a knowledge factory, with the artisanal techniques and reformist aspirations of a laboratory of educational internationalism. And its working tools and methods of dissemination were manifold.

The IBE’s Bulletins, published quarterly between 1925 and 1968 (172 in all), constituted the heart of the collection’s activity, centralising, synthesising and disseminating information. They made possible distillation of innovative experiments and publications from around the world. What was being done and written in the Soviet Union and the United States, as well as in China, Asia, Japan, Latin America and Oceania, were documented side by side, even if Europe was given a special place. The data were either provided by the IBE’s national centres and its partners around the world (colleagues, associations, ministries), or compiled by members of the IBE secretariat, which subscribed to most of the world’s educational journals. They were then selected and synthesised, and often by countries surveyed or themes covered.

The secretariat quickly realised that this was an enormous undertaking, in terms of costs (acquisition and mailing costs), human andlinguistic resources (only three to four people to manage four to ten languages), and the space available for storing publications and information. Over time, journals were increasingly subordinated to thematic bibliographies; negotiations to avoid purchasing and mailing costs for publications were reinforced and there was increased recourse to external correspondents for the translation of documents produced by the IBE.

After having organised a whole series of thematic exhibitions (on inter-school correspondence, the teaching of reading or peace education), since 1927 the IBE had initiated the Permanent Exhibition of Public Education. These exhibitions served as instruments for exhibiting emblematic material and experiments, offering a showcase for the diversity of cultures and the richness of the world heritage, raising awareness of the most crucial educational problems and equipping educationalists to solve them. Within the IBE itself and at the sites where its conferences were held, any visitor could swiftly take in the evolution of the educational world, and become familiar with foreign countries, in order to better link their own experience to that of other peoples. In its 1967 Bulletin, the IBE advertised its exhibition in this manner: “36 countries represented: school activities, handicrafts, children’s drawings, applied arts, textbooks, children’s books, organisation of education” (Bulletin 1967, 165, p. 224).

A huge volume of objects was thus accumulated, which were gradually integrated into the International Library of Pedagogy. In 1934, one read “[b]ooks received for review or for our Permanent Exhibition: 84 (in Dutch, English, French, German, Esperanto, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish, Polish and Russian)”; there were 1154 in the last quarter of 1968. (Bulletin, 33, p. 207; 169, p. 234) “The whole of its documentation enables the IBE to respond to a good number of requests transmitted to it by UNESCO, in particular by the Information Centre regarding education,” wrote Piaget in 1965 in his report to the Joint Committee.Footnote 12 Publicity for the library proudly announced:

Collection of works on pedagogy, educational psychology, comparative education and school organisation (36,000 volumes). Textbook collection from 104 countries (25,000 volumes). Children’s literature collection from 52 countries (27,000 volumes). Collection of educational journals (650 journals from 70 countries, received regularly). (Bulletin 1967, 165, p. 224)Footnote 13

There was also an immense collection of documents on education law. The centralisation and collection of information was the main task of the secretariat, which in 1956 consisted in eight people out of the fifteen employed by the IBE, the others being divided between administration and research.Footnote 14 The description of their tasks was set out in the weekly plans: “combing” the journals and books to “collect news” and “write reports”; then “filing the files and news in the bulletin” and of course “translating them into several languages”. It was necessary to “collate” and “catalogue” all the books received and “sort out the magazines”: a veritable swarm of educational documents from all over the world. Not always an easy job, as described with a touch of humour by a long-time secretary, Nadine Reymond, in her activity plan for 23–28 April 1956: “Collating in the morning and afternoon until exhaustion (of the stock and the person concerned). Eventually (and how!) dealing with the records of informal meetings (1955 conferences)”.Footnote 15

Documentation frenzy: more than 100,000 books on the field of education in the library; about 15,000 bibliographic records and as many short news items published on the world education movement; thousands of exhibits. This was the IBE’s continuous underground work, its hidden side behind the showcase of the ICPEs.