The nineteenth century can boast of having abolished slavery by law, and the twentieth century should devote its efforts to the abolishing of another form of slavery – illiteracy. (Jaime Torres Bodet, Director of UNESCO, ICPE, 1949, p. 22)

The mission that the IBE set itself when it established itself as an intergovernmental body and then institutionalised its ICPEs in 1934 was to universalise access to schooling; its aim was to cover the entire planet. None of the 65 international surveys linked to the ICPEs examined for this book deviated from this “act of faith”: whatever its form, schooling was held to be a benefit with pacifying, integrating and even emancipating aims. The discourse on the hundreds of millions of people who had not been able to benefit from these advantages bore witness to this and echoed certain tones of the civilising discourse of the nineteenth century. Unfairly excluded from the march of progress and therefore deprived of the means to integrate socially, these people would find themselves embittered in the face of a “foreign” and “hostile” universe, and would consequently fall into a dark misery and, inevitably, into decay, delinquency and violence.

This universal principle was, however, accompanied by a host of precautions which, as we shall see, also testified to the contradictions and dead-ends to be overcome. Schooling was in fact the preferred instrument for integrating and pacifying the masses, guaranteeing social order and economic expansion, by disseminating the benefits of a broad culture that would contribute to the formation of well-integrated and productive citizens, aware of their rights and above all their duties. It was therefore a question of using school not only to achieve autonomy and build a critical mind but also to “format” the population and future citizens.

While all surveys and ICPEs contributed in some way to this broad campaign for schooling, 20 surveys were more specifically concerned with solving the problems associated with the generalisation of access to education. This chapter focuses on these surveys, examining in turn certain paradoxes of the undertaking: how to manage numbers at school while taking into account both equality in education and the needs of the market and the economy? How to ensure the dissemination of an adequate culture while respecting individual and “community” specificities? How could democracy and justice be consolidated through the school, when, throughout the twentieth century, certain social sciences have shown that this institution itself reproduces, supports and even reinforces divisions and discrimination?

A Proactive Policy for Educating the World

The 1930s exemplify this voluntarist policy of schooling to which the IBE invited governments and their ministerial delegates, who in turn were to rally their own administrations and populations. This is evident in the choice of themes addressed as well as in the exchanges and recommendations that followed. Although they all declared themselves to be in favour of schooling, during the ICPEs the school authorities were urged to better assume their responsibilities in order to work for “school justice” as an “indispensable corollary of social justice”:Footnote 1 the obligation of education and its prolongation, which presupposed free education as well as the extension and generalisation of access to secondary education, constrained not only the juvenile population and their families but also the political authorities. The state was now obliged to guarantee sufficient education for everyone, regardless of their abilities and background, by means of legal measures and adequate schooling and finances. The ICPEs’ recommendations also obliged employers to comply with laws against child exploitation.Footnote 2 The dramatic context amplified the concerns and recommendations: both in the 1930s and after the war, there was talk of unemployment, social conflicts, poverty and school drop-out rates in rural areas. The delegates were invited to adopt proposals that encouraged their governments and employers’ organisations not to sacrifice youth on the altar of their own interests.

Among the main problems faced by governments were that of matching the age of completion of compulsory schooling with the age of admission to work; that of increasing the number of schooling opportunities to be provided to the new school-going population; the issue of linking curriculums between educational institutions; and the question of the conditions of access to school for everyone and, for longer studies, for deserving but needy pupils (exemptions from school fees, scholarships, school buses, canteens, etc.).

The management of school numbers during the depression of the 1930s was a delicate matter and appeared to be the preferred instrument for regulating the labour market: adjusting education to the determining interests of the region; reducing the rural exodus and the attraction of the cities; absorbing the influx of students into overcrowded fields and professions; avoiding any social downgrading and, conversely, containing educational ambitions deemed to be excessive.Footnote 3 With regard to admission to secondary school (1934), while most of the delegates argued for a common first cycle, many of the positions taken on the second cycle were characterised by school Malthusianism. The delegate from Guatemala, Professeur L. Martinez Mont, suggested that it would be preferable to concentrate efforts on improving the primary level—which was under-attended—rather than expanding the secondary level (ICPE, 1934, p. 67). Should selection not be strengthened and barriers built between school streams to reduce overcrowding in some streams and the resulting unemployment?Footnote 4 The debate was focused in particular on the definition of the elites, the plural form being resolutely claimed (France), in order to enhance the value of the less-prized professions and the importance of the branches of education: middle schools, upper primary schools, practical schools and vocational schools. The nature and scope of school culture as well as its aims were negotiated, depending on whether secondary education—which was gradually becoming the focus of reforms in many countries—was the prelude to the world of work or a preparation for higher education.

From the Right to Be Different, to the Difference in Rights

These debates reveal governments’ dual discourse concerning the populations themselves, testifying to the ambivalence of the policies towards them: sometimes there were complaints about the hostility of the populations towards schooling and other times the complaints were about their abusive educational aspirations.

Following the example of Russia, campaigns were encouraged, to convince families not to give in to the temptation of immediate gains, sacrificing, out of greed, the development of their children, who were themselves tempted by this paid freedom.Footnote 5 Marcel NynsFootnote 6 concluded in his general report on the question that to reach the “masses” only constraint would be effective (ICPE, 1934, pp. 114–115). At the same time, there was a desire to channel social demand and the aspirations of the population to enjoy a better life through the sometimes-ill-considered quest for educational qualifications. In particular, there was alarm at the massive proportion of pupils admitted to secondary school who left without completing it (an average of 45%, varying between 10% and 90% depending on the country), thus wasting their youth, their potential labour and public funds (p. 122).Footnote 7

A more appropriate educational and professional orientation appeared to be the solution to these risks. The moralising dimension of schooling was required to instil a taste for work, contentment with one’s lot, and to fight against the “attraction of sprawling cities” (ICPE, 1936, p. 22).Footnote 8 Even when it came to primary schooling, at the request of French delegate Barrier, the resolutions gave precedence to “the dominant rural, industrial and commercial interests of the region”, and not to “the interests of the child” (pp. 53 and 58), as the US delegate had suggested in vain.Footnote 9

These clearly stated socio-economic issuesFootnote 10 also relate to the geographical contexts concerned. Rural and mountainous regions, with low population densities, immediately raised numerous questions, which is why they were included on the agenda of the 1936 Conference.Footnote 11 There was the dual challenge of bringing the benefits of modern civilisation to these isolated regions, marked by poverty, and often by austerity and aridity, and at the same time recognising the full value of the rural and alpine populations, “which it is necessary to safeguard in integrity” (R 8, 1936, recital 1). Simplicity, wisdom, dignity, robustness and ancestral know-how were praised. As a messenger of progress when it promoted the “world march of education”, the IBE was all the more successful in adjusting its message because it remained impregnated with a Rousseauist naturalism that held country life as a privileged space for respecting the natural development of each individual. The Colombian delegate boasted that his country followed Dewey and, in so doing, sought to “ruralise all schools […] even urban schools […] designed to give all children a love of the countryside […] the notions of hygiene, agriculture, […] a spirit of cheerfulness, simplicity and work” (ICPE, 1936, p. 46).Footnote 12

While we can clearly see the concern to ward off any social deregulation by fixing populations on their native soil and in their environment—a fixation which would also embody a so-called natural selection—the IBE also expressed itself in terms of school justice. It aimed to detect the specificities of all child populations, in order to guarantee them access to an appropriate education: for nomads, children of sailors, boatmen and families in desert, oceanic, tropical and polar areas, sometimes also evoking families of specific ethnicities and religions; few specific surveys were dedicated to them, but the evocation of these populations permeated the Conferences.Footnote 13

It was a question not only of taking into account and adjusting to conditions and environments but also of respecting the diversity of aptitudes and interests of each individual, in order to recognise their specific identity. The attention paid to special education and the plea for the educability and recognition of the dignity of “blind, deaf-mute and mentally unstable children” are evidence of this. They too would be entitled to appropriate measures to “be trained like other children to profit by the moral, artistic and intellectual riches which give to human life its true value” (R 7, 1936, recital 2).

These specificities were presented as facts, even if it was felt that they could lead to poverty, which must be combated. Rather than “reducing them to inequalities”, the IBE—in keeping with the basic principles of the Institut Rousseau and the new education—sought to recognise and adapt to them. Adjusting to such specificities, in the name of the right to be different, as we know in retrospect, contains the possible pitfall of a differentiation of rights, by referring everyone to their origins and characteristics (Droux et al., 2022). In the post-war period, this contradiction would become more apparent in the IBE, which was also a sounding board for educational debates around the world, which it reconfigured and relayed in its turn (Image 21.1).

Image 21.1
A photograph of a page with a response in Arabic from Saudi Arabia's minister of education.

Response of the Minister of Education of Saudi Arabia of 31 October 1959 to the IBE survey on the organisation of special education for mentally deficient children. The minister replied that this type of education required special teacher skills which the country did not have at that time. However, the Ministry planned to establish a department for this type of education as soon as resources permitted. The IBE had first investigated this problem in 1936. The 1959 survey focused on “educable” and “recoverable” mental retardation. Seventy-one countries responded, and 79 participated in the 1960 Conference on the subject and produced Recommendation N° 51, which aimed to improve early diagnosis and “special education for the mentally retarded” through appropriate structures, methods, programmes and professionals. (© IBE)

Full size image

Fighting Illiteracy, Symbol of Modern Slavery

“Let all who believe in the power of education and place their hopes in it [unite] to combat the unleashed powers of evil and political passions” (p. 20). Such was the programme of the IBE’s 1946 Conference, the organisation of which was begun on the still-smouldering ashes of the war. The challenge lay in the “pedagogical rebuilding of the world”. The impassioned speeches closely linked social justice and educational justice “in order to meet the peoples’ new political aspirations” (p. 20). But what was particularly worrying in the eyes of the IBE was the gigantic problem of millions of people left to their own devices in the deepest ignorance, powerless and uncultured, and whose bitterness and aggressiveness were likely to destabilise peace and democracy. Ignorance begat poverty which provoked social unrest and “leaves the way open to false prophets”, as much a threat to democracy as to international security (Torres Bodet, ICPE, 1950, p. 31).

Modern education could not accommodate illiteracy, which is a form of slavery, in formal contradiction with democratic principles and human rights. Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), once adopted, constituted the reference and guided the discourse of the umbrella bodies of the ICPEs, namely UNESCO and the IBE, which were now associated in the convening of conferences.

We have a supreme duty – to help, as teachers, to organise a society in which every man will be able to shake hands, in brotherly trust and friendship, with his kinsmen from Europe or Asia, to clasp the ebony hand of the man from Africa and the bronze hand of the Indian from American. All races, all peoples, all national aspirations must find expression in this post-war world. If a single voice were to be silent, if a single right were to be trodden under foot, humanity would have shed its blood in vain in those great battles. (Torres Bodet, 1949, p. 25)

There was constant advocacy for the free development of the human person and “the right to education at all levels, the right to culture in all its forms” (p. 29) and the right to speak, regardless of ethnic, religious, social, racial or sexual affiliation, whatever may be the aptitudes, aspirations and interests of each individual.

Behind Equal Opportunity for All, a Tenacious Ideology of Merit

Comparisons between the debates of the 1930s and those of the post-war period are instructive, in order to identify how the management of similar problems evolved or not. At the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, the key words of social justice and equality of opportunity were used as if they were self-evident and that the “march of progress in education in the world”Footnote 14 was concrete proof of this.

Access to secondary schools is a striking example of this, and also allows the identification of certain ambivalences at a time when the question of the concretisation of these principles was being raised. The titles themselves were adjusted: “admission to secondary school” (1934) was replaced by “equal access to secondary school” (1946). Rejecting the elitist definition of secondary education, which was sometimes even considered outdated, there was a plea for the unification of the school organisation chart and the widening of recruitment in secondary education, thanks to the improvement of selection, differentiation and orientation methods. There was a strong plea to delay the age of diagnoses in order to avoid repeating and amplifying the discrimination linked to cultural and social origins. It was a question of better guiding pupils in their choice of studies and profession, in order to “help to democratise as well as universalise secondary education as a result of which there should be fewer misfits and wastages”, the director of UNESCO concluded in 1954 (p. 22).

This did not prevent contradictory debates on the definition of equality (social or of intelligence) and merit, contradictions behind which the perennial fear of social downgrading and of an embittered intellectual proletariat can sometimes be perceived.

Better educational and vocational guidance rallied most of the protagonists, especially when it came to thinking about the reorganisation of secondary education. It should be noted that Piaget and his fellow travellers at the Institut universitaire des sciences de l’éducation of the University of Geneva were specialised in this field and constantly demonstrated the benefits of this orientation, especially if it was not too early. The recommendations that concluded the debates regularly advocated striving to achieve this “ideal of equal educational opportunity for all” (R 19, 1946, recital 2), improving both the principles of selection and differentiation, and increasing the nature of support for the gifted and even more so for the exceptionally gifted. The director of the Indian Bureau of Psychology, Lieutenant Colonel Sohan Lall, based in Allahabad, was enthusiastic about the possibility of screening the most gifted, “for the country had an urgent need throughout its economy of first class brains” (ICPE, 1948, p. 52). However, when it came to the role of school psychologists (1948), which was so highly praised by Piaget, a few dissenting voices were heard. The Czech delegate, Josef Vaná, was particularly concerned about this dangerous psychologisation, which risked reinforcing prejudices against less intelligent children, without taking into account their living conditions and environment: “Psychology thus risks becoming a differentiation of social classes” (1946, p. 49).Footnote 15

A reading of the minutes from the two decades that followed shows that there was an acute awareness of the interrelationship between social origins and educational destiny, as well as a concern to reduce the impact on disadvantaged groups. The ideology of merit, which was already very much in evidence in the inter-war period, was sometimes confirmed and sometimes challenged.Footnote 16 For some, compensatory offers to the disadvantaged but truly deserving populations were seen as constituting equality in education, offering the possibility to all those who really had the aptitude to gain access to extended schooling and the diplomas that follow. Others, however, made more drastic demands, so that democratisation did not remain an act of faith and a delusion, but would be transformed into real equity in the conditions of schooling and access not only to diplomas but also to the most recognised jobs. Even if they were rarely explicitly called upon, the sociological theories of reproduction shine through in the debates, calling into question the ideology of merit which, in fact, sanctions, supports and amplifies sociocultural hierarchies.Footnote 17

Insert 21.1 Universal Access to Education Implies Material and Institutional Infrastructures

It would be idealistic and naïve to devote an intergovernmental organisation to promoting access for everybody to quality education, without addressing the problems of infrastructure and the material and institutional conditions that bear on bringing this about. Taking into account all the IBE surveys, they are the subject of some 16 specific investigations (cf. Appendix B).

The conditions were first global, concerning society and the state as a whole. It was not at all by chance that one of the first three surveys discussed by the ICPE (1934) concerned savings in public education, and sought to “demonstrate that most of the cuts […] threaten the future of the people in a particularly dangerous way” (p. 134). These financial issues were a common thread in the concerns of the IBE, which continued investigating the subject—the 1955 ICPE was dedicated to this—and it advocated that a specified percentage of gross domestic product should be allocated to education, even at the expense of war budgets!

Material infrastructures relate particularly to the number of schools needed to keep up with the demographic explosion and the increased length of schooling and also to the need to take into account the provision of buildings and study spaces. At the XXth ICPE in 1957, the French delegate Roger Franck, rapporteur of the survey on school buildings, gave some sense of this:

Twenty-four countries concerning which we have fairly precise information and which represent almost a quarter of the world’s population, are together preparing to build new primary and secondary schools with accommodation for 40 million pupils […] Consequently, whether future ranks of school children taken as a whole have, under suitable conditions, the possibility of equipping themselves for the world, depends partly upon us. (p. 147)

Free educational supplies were also needed for proper teaching and to give everyone access to learning at all levels: “Equal opportunity in education raises material difficulties, not least the high price of textbooks and school supplies”, argued Butts in the summary ofthe IBE’s 1934 study of the economics of public education (p. 10). Accordingly, the ICPE adopted the following resolutions in the immediate post-war period:

[The ICPE] believes on the one hand that the principle of the free provision of school supplies ought to be considered as the natural and necessary corollary of compulsory schooling, and on the other hand that the application of this principle to young people attending non-compulsory types of education, should be considered as the human ideal towards which one ought to aim. (R 21, 1947, N°1)

Similarly, the problem of school canteens and changing rooms was addressed as the war had faced public authorities with the hardships of young people living in miserable conditions, hungry and ill-clothed, without the mental and physical resources to benefit from the “advantages of school”.

Institutional conditions were also pertinent. School councils and inspections were dealt with in three ICPEs in 1935, 1937 and 1956, and were also considered essential to quality education. It was specified from the outset that this was not so much a question of checking teachers’ work as of working with them in order to preserve their energies, aptitudes and convictions, anticipating, as it were, the notion of life-long learning:

Inspection should contribute to the expansion of education designed to bring about the all-round education of children and youth, through their moral, intellectual and physical development in the service of their mother country, and to further democracy, peace and friendship among nations. (R 42, 1956, N°3)

The increasing complexity and diversification of the school system also necessitated the creation of new structures, based on the social and educational sciences in particular: psychological services for the guidance of pupils, mentioned in many ICPEs and the subject of resolutions in 1948 and 1963, and this time also including professional guidance and educational research centres, adopted in 1966, which aimed to “establish theoretical and scientific bases constituting short and long-term educational goals suitable for the country in question” (R 60, 1966, N°2).

From the 1960s onwards, the problems of educational planning were at the fore, aiming to make rational choices in all parts of the world to provide long-term educational opportunities adapted to demographic and migratory trends, to socio-economic imperatives, to social expectations and to increasingly rapid social change:

If education is to be planned […] it is because we live in times which have no longer the single-minded outlook of peaceful eras when it is possible to advance solely by the force of inertia; it is now a matter of living development with many dimensions which its very progress carries forward with irresistible impetus. (ICPE, 1962, p. 44)