The International Bureau of Education (IBE) was the product of a collective genesis. First of all, it was the continuation of a plethora of initiatives which, already around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were working towards the institutionalisation of networks dedicated to education and childhood, considering that it was through the transformation of young minds that peace on earth could be preserved. The contours of the IBE were furthermore sketched out in a particular context, in effervescent post-war Geneva, at a time when the city was designated to host the League of Nations (LoN) and the constellation of agencies that surrounded it.

Here, we focus on this period and we analyse the dynamics of this genesis in order to understand what led the intellectuals, psycho-pedagogues and educators grouped around the Institut Rousseau to conceive of their institution as one of the international agencies representing the values of peace, international solidarity and social justice, emblematic of the “spirit of Geneva”.Footnote 1 We pay particular attention to the way in which its promoters seized these exceptional circumstances to open up the field of possibilities in order to try to establish themselves as legitimate protagonists of events. The history of the genesis of the IBE is closely linked to that of the Institut Rousseau.

Compensating for the Shortcomings of the Treaty of Versailles

Already long convinced of the primacy of education in order to pacify the world, many pedagogues and intellectuals were astonished and even mutinous in the aftermath of the First World War: why did children not benefit, like workers with the International Labour Organisation (ILO), from an international body concerned with their fate, when it was generally agreed that the future of mankind depended on the education of new generations? The school was also in the dock during the Great War: steeped in nationalism and devoted to obedience, it was said to have trained pupils to become brave soldiers, meekly going off to the battlefields to die as patriots.Footnote 2 For the pacifist and feminist educators and intellectuals who pronounced this verdict, only a profound educational reform would preserve peace: the school’s mission must be to forge responsible, free and autonomous citizens, committed to the values of solidarity and international understanding.

Calls for a permanent International Bureau of Education were included in the Memorandum that the International Council of Women (ICW), the Allied Women’s Suffragists’ Conference of the allied countries and of United States of America presented to the highest officials of the League of Nations Commission in April 1919. In vain. Convinced that peace on earth could not be built solely through diplomacy but should also include the whole of civil society, requiring a transformation of mentalities, many associations and leagues mobilised to make up for the “inadequacies” of the Treaty of Versailles: they tried to bestow a mission of intellectual and educational cooperation on the so-called technical agencies of the LoN.Footnote 3

The representatives of the Institut Rousseau/École des sciences de l’éducation [School of sciences of education]Footnote 4 had their sights set on these movements and joined several of them, in order to have their voice and their work recognised. They now seemed convinced that they could link the destinies of their small institution with those of the world. Three of them in particular, established in Geneva while benefiting from a vast circle of intellectual solidarity, became the zealous promoters of an office aiming to preserve peace on earth through science and education. The doctor and psycho-pedagogue Édouard Claparède, holder of the chair of experimental psychology at the University of Geneva (since 1908), on whose initiative the Institut Rousseau was founded in 1912; the philosopher and pedagogue Pierre Bovet, who was the director of the Institute and was appointed professor of “science of education and experimental pedagogy” in 1920; the reformist sociologist and also pedagogue Adolphe Ferrière, who collaborated extensively with the Institut, and considered that the International Bureau of New Schools (IBEN),Footnote 5 which he had already set up in 1899, could be the foundation on which the new international bureau could be built.Footnote 6 They were supported by their families and close colleagues at the Institut Rousseau, by researchers, trade union practitioners and politicians, notably Alice Descœudres, Robert Dottrens, Max Hochstaetter, Albert Malche and Paul Meyhoffer.

Among their many networks of support was the Union of International Associations (UIA, founded in 1907; Laqua et al., 2019). In his Petit Journal Adolphe Ferrière told of how he joined the teachers’ section of the international Unions’ congress in September 1920 when it “addressed the wish to LoN to support education research laboratories”.Footnote 7 He nevertheless managed to get the IBEN recognised by the UIA and by the international bureaux section of the LoN, thanks to exchanges which the thinkers at the head of Institut Rousseau had with the Belgian pacifist internationalists Paul Otlet and Henri la Fontaine,Footnote 8 as well as with a number of diplomats who, in the early 1920s, were beginning to converge in Geneva.

Members of the Institut Rousseau also focused on the activities of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF, founded in 1915Footnote 9), which had recently been established in Geneva to enable it to more actively influence the work of the LoN. Through Claparède, Bovet and Ferrière, closer links were established with the energetic feminist Elisabeth RottenFootnote 10 who addressed the pacifists of the whole world and the representatives of the LoN in particular, urging them to ensure the “salvation of humanity” through emancipatory education. This “revolution”, she claimed, required the foundation of an international bureau of education, which she recommended be established in Geneva, more precisely at the Institut Rousseau, which she believed would already embody “die beste Inspiration” (Rotten, 1920, p. 67). From then on, regular meetings were held on this subject at the headquarters of the Institut, which welcomed notables, scholars and government delegates who passed through or settled in Geneva, as the diplomatic ballet of international conferences began.

Dithering at the LoN

At its first assembly in Geneva in December 1920, the LoN learned of some of these proposals and entrusted their processing to its representatives. In March 1921, the Frenchman Léon Bourgeois, president of the first LoN Council, endorsed the wish to see the LoN set up a bureau to spread the ideas of international cooperation, which were in fact in line with his philosophy of solidarity.Footnote 11 During the course of 1921, the project was supported by various diplomats in turn, notably the French, Belgian, Chinese, HaitianFootnote 12 and Japanese. At the same time, the UAI, led by Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, mobilised at the Palais Mondial in Brussels in the summer of 1921, on the occasion of its International Congress of Intellectual Labour. Education appears in one of its resolutions in the wake of a convergent decision in favour of the “interests of intelligence”:

Appeal to the Assembly of the League of Nations to accept the demands of the Congress of Intellectual Labour and that the interests of Intelligence be represented in the Society like those of politics, finance and manual labour. […]

[On the proposal of Ferrière] That an International Bureau of Education for the comparative study of modern pedagogical data be set up in conjunction with the League of Nations and the proposed instance for Intellectual Labour.Footnote 13 (UAI, 1921, pp. 180, 165)

Was this request heard? Supported by a number of intellectuals, politicians and diplomats, Léon Bourgeois became its defender within the Wilsonian agency. This was evident in his report presented on 2 September 1921 in Geneva, which suggested the appointment of a commission to study international questions of intellectual cooperation and education. Once adopted, the Bourgeois resolution was first debated in committee and then submitted to the LoN Assembly on 21 September 1921. The Assembly dismissed the educational aspectFootnote 14: educational issues were the sole prerogative of states, which the LoN should not interfere with, even though the deleterious effects of nationalist teaching were recognised. After conflictual debates, only “intellectual cooperation” was chosen, laying the foundations for the creation, in 1922, of the International Commission for Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC), then, in 1925, of the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC), financed by France.Footnote 15 Its tasks were to include, on the fringes first, school-related matters and in particular teaching the LoN’s aims to young people as well as the revision of school textbooks, including history textbooks, in order to remove any bellicose spirit.Footnote 16

After the workers (ILO), here were the intellectuals endowed in their turn with an international organisation. Still nothing specifically dedicated to education and childhood? A succession of leagues and associations mobilised and worked together to fill this gap. The archives bear witness to the many steps taken in this direction, while also revealing the internal struggles and bitter negotiations to circumscribe the territories: childhood and education proved to be particularly coveted targets (Image 2.1).

Image 2.1
A program pamphlet of The Institut Rousseau. The left side has a sketch of the institute. The right side has a text with information in a foreign language.

The Institut Rousseau is the founder of the IBE (1925). Created in 1912 by Édouard Claparède, this institute aimed to train educators, teachers and researchers in all educational disciplines, hence the plural in its name “School of educational sciences”. As a precursor, it organised holiday courses (here in 1916, on the measurement of intelligence). (© AIJJR)

Full size image

The Institut Rousseau, Figurehead of Educational Internationalism?

A core group of pacifists and pedagogues from the Institut Rousseau decided to present themselves as legitimate founders of the International Bureau of Education. They activated their networks of relations, in particular teachers and their associations, as well as activists of the new education, the Esperanto and pacifist movements and representatives of the political and academic authorities and also certain ambassadors of the LoN and its technical agencies.

Among their most influential correspondents were Swiss political figures such as Gustave Ador, Giuseppe Motta, Friedrich Zollinger and international diplomats involved in social and educational issues such as James Eric Drummond, Inazō Nitobé, Léon Bourgeois, Henri Lafontaine, Robert Cecil and especially Albert Thomas.Footnote 17 The personalities who rallied to the cause of the Institut Rousseau, with it, seized on the dynamics set in motion in the salons and circles of Geneva, the “new capital of world diplomacy”. They tried to position themselves as figureheads of educational internationalism, in order to “pull the desired strings”, “to enter into unofficial contact with the delegates of the countries that we know to be interested in our subject”, as recommended in the preliminary drafts drawn up,Footnote 18 when the 3rd Assembly of the LoN was held in Geneva in September 1922. However, they were cautious: above all, they kept to a scientific and educational stance; they avoided any political compromising involvement by not placing themselves under the aegis of intergovernmental agencies; they approached technical organisations and prominent scientific bodies (the ILO, universities, scientific centres and laboratories). For example, fruitful collaborations multiplied with the ILO, above all in the field of vocational guidance, a particularly socially sensitive area of research.Footnote 19 Moreover, the Institut Rousseau mobilised the intellectuals in its vast scholarly networkFootnote 20 to encourage those personalities and institutions likely to contribute their scientific to the project.

At the same time, on the initiative of Ludwig W. Rajchman, Director of the LoN Health Organisation, international civil servants asked the Institut Rousseau to create the International School (1924), that is, “a good progressive school” for the children of international civil servants based in Geneva.Footnote 21 If Ferrière and his family were involved in this school, known as Ecolint, it was to attest the internationalist and pacifist mission of the new education and their Institute. This school—nicknamed the “League of Nations in miniature” by Ferrière—claimed to be an “example and model” from which the schools of the future would be inspired.Footnote 22 The first school class was established on an experimental basis, in Ferrière’s own garden, and he was the technical advisor. The Ecolint was sponsored by an association made up of about thirty personalities from the major international organisations and local elites whose social, financial and cultural capital served as a guarantee for the school. Among them were also the most fervent advocates of an IBE in Geneva. When it expanded, the school established its primary and secondary levels near the Institut Rousseau, explicitly claiming to be in the spirit of the active school in order to build the “Spirit of Geneva, this international spirit which reigned in the circles of the LoN and which the directors of the school also strove to instil in their pupils” (Dupuy, 1926, p. 18).

Having failed to obtain the resources and support needed to create the envisaged International Bureau from scratch, the leaders of the Institut Rousseau, once again assisted by a circle of strategic intellectuals and diplomats, agreed on a new tactic: to make people believe that the IBE already really existed. The Institut did in fact function as such; did not its inaugural concept present it as a centre for research, documentation and international information and propaganda for children and the preservation of their rights? Since 1912, had it not functioned as an international agency, with not only a research centre comprising a laboratory, a foreign information service, a series of publications (Bulletins, Archives of Psychology, book series) and experimental schools (including the Maison des petits and now the “School of the League of Nations”), but also the main functions devolved to this imagined bureau?

As the autumn of 1925 passed, the strategy of making it appear that the IBE already existed and that its formalisation depended only on recognition and available resources gained ground. In November 1925, Claparède learned that his efforts to get the Institut Rousseau a grant from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund had been successful.Footnote 23 This substantial sum (equivalent to CHF 25,000 per year Footnote 24), which could be renewed, gave the spokespersons of the Institut Rousseau the exceptional opportunity to create the much-dreamed-of International Bureau of Education. On December 18, 1925, dispatches officially announced the foundation (Image 2.2).

Image 2.2
A photograph of a handwritten list of members for the honorary committee of the I B E. The text at the top is in a foreign language.

A list of members for the honorary committee of the IBE. In preparing the foundation of the IBE, the Institut Rousseau requested support from well-known personalities, who could reinforce its credibility. (© AIJJR)

Full size image

Insert 2.1 The Institut Rousseau: A “Temple Dedicated to Childhood”

In 1912, at a time when chairs, laboratories and institutes dedicated to an experimental approach to educational phenomena were multiplying throughout the world, the doctor and psychologist Édouard Claparède created the Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Privately owned and under the direction of the philosopher and psychologist Pierre Bovet, the Institute opened its doors in October 1912, with about twenty students and the same number of staff.

Claparède’s programmatic text (1912) indicated the Institute’s four functions:

  1. 1.

    A school allowing educators to orient, document and train themselves in scientific method and to collaborate in developing the science of education;

  2. 2.

    A research centre to ensure the progress of this new science;

  3. 3.

    An information centre collecting and disseminating research;

  4. 4.

    A centre of propaganda for educational renewal.

The interrelation of these roles was significant: like many other psychologists, doctors and pedagogues (Alfred Binet, Ernst Meumann, Ovide Decroly and Maria Montessori in particular), Claparède was convinced that education had to be reformed. Invoking the “brilliant pedagogical intuitions” of Rousseau, who was held up as a precursor, Claparède called for “functional education”: a better knowledge of the child and the laws of his or her development was essential in order to take into account his or her needs, and the child should henceforth—in a “Copernican revolution”—become the “centre of the educational system.”

Psychology was the first discipline to be called upon to enrich this knowledge of the child, even if other disciplines were also incorporated into this new “School” that was significantly named with the plural “of sciences of education”: anthropology, biology, law, history, medicine, pedagogy, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and sociology.

In fact, the Institute was in tune with the “spirit of the age”, drawing ample inspiration from experiences elsewhere in the world, and constantly seeking information and inspiration from what was happening in Europe and the Americas, and even, from time to time, in Africa and Asia. The Institut Rousseau was closely connected to most of the sites (laboratories, schools, Institutes, associations, congresses) where new educational theories and practices were experimented with and tested. These circulated in a dynamic movement that transcended national, cultural and disciplinary boundaries. The members of the Institut Rousseau took advantage of this internationalist turn of events and the educational effervescence that characterised the inter-war period to invite educators and researchers from all parts of the world to combine their efforts in order to produce, collect, discuss and disseminate all the knowledge likely to fuel a “universalisable” educational revolution. Those involved in the Institute, both students and professors, travelled the world to examine new experiments and make their own pedagogical discoveries, in order to test, improve and disseminate them.

In 1929, an agreement linked the Institute to the Faculty of Arts of the University of Geneva. Under the direction of the triumvirate, Bovet (pedagogy), Claparède (psychology) and Piaget (administration), the newly named Institut universitaire des sciences de l’éducation redefined its functions: it cut back its militancy in favour of more academic commitments and henceforth took charge of the theoretical training of primary school teachers in the canton of Geneva. It moved to the Palais Wilson in 1937, together with the International Bureau of Education which it had founded in 1925, thanks to a donation by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund. During the 1930s and 1940s, despite the worsening international situation, the Institute consolidated its achievements and enjoyed a reputation which, according to its directors, was only equalled in Switzerland by that of the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. In Europe, moreover, while nationalism was on the rise, similar institutes were disappearing one after the other.

But the reduction and then the suppression of the Rockefeller subsidy and especially the repercussions of the Second World War,reducing student numbers and fees, raised the question of its survival. At the end of the world conflict, the Institute was drained, even though its reputation remained secure. Under the expert leadership of the new generation, Jean Piaget and Robert Dottrens, co-directors since 1944, a project took shape to attain full academic recognition for the Institute, its collaborators and the qualifications it awarded. Scientific research became more professional and led to disciplinary specialisations, allowing psychology in particular to expand its territory, thanks to Jean Piaget and his numerous collaborators. The Institute’s substantial contribution to the theoretical and professional training of primary teachers was decisive, as the issue of their professional qualification at a time of expansion of education systems was proving crucial everywhere. Its reputation, presented as unique in Europe, was unanimously recognised for its contribution to the development of Geneva as an international city. The principle of an “Inter-Faculty Institute” soon won over academic and political authorities, as well as representatives of the Institute itself. Officially adopted in February 1948, the Institute gained autonomy by becoming inter-faculty, attached to the humanities, sciences, social sciences and medicine, all fields in which it had built up its expertise.

At the end of the 1960s, the Institute was once again faced with a difficult situation. Insufficient resources, the lack of space and the dilapidated state of the premises in the Palais Wilson were among the difficulties that hindered the smooth running of the Institute from day to day. But this situation was symptomatic of deeper problems. Indeed, the academic and administrative structures of the Institute had become inadequate and did not allow it to meet the increasing and diversifying demands of training, and still less those of research. “Why doesn’t the Institute have the title of a faculty?” asked those who wanted more autonomy. With the support of both the rectorate and the State Council of the canton, this ambition was fulfilled. On 10 January 1975, the Faculté de psychologie et des sciences de l’éducation was created, the seventh faculty in the University of Geneva. This enabled it to gradually acquire academic credentials, especially as it experienced an impressive increase in its student population, and notably of women which, over time, would help to challenge the glass ceiling which still impinges on academic careers.