The “Family of Nations” and Its Racial, Cultural and Colonial Discriminations

Abstract

At first, the issue of educational justice was focused on relations between individuals, but due to the pressure of the decolonisation movements it was extended to relations between peoples: the IBE and its conferences were presented as a “family of nations” whose interdependence presupposed that there was a place for all of them. The chapter shows how the IBE tried to accommodate the new aspirations of peoples and also claimed to offer a platform to all of them, in a world marked by cultural, social and ethnic prejudice. A world where, moreover, the great powers presented themselves as emblems of civilisation and its principles of justice, while at the same time appropriating the planet as a field for their confrontations, endangering populations which had long become invisible and were reduced to silence.

The question of the world’s great divisions, which had been touched on in the ICPEs¹ in the 1930s, relating to the rights of peoples, was thrust to the forefront in the post-war period. From the outset, reference was made to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the shared reference horizon. Of course, this Declaration itself could be read and has been interpreted² as a “civilising mission”, given the context of its pronouncement, its contents and its aims, in other words the “overarching universalism” (Merleau-Ponty, 1960, p. 76)³ which characterised UN agencies and their educational policies at that time.

At first, the issue of educational justice was focused on relations between individuals, but due to the pressure of independence and decolonisation movements it was extended to relations between peoples:⁴ the IBE and its conferences were presented as a “family of nations” (ICPE, 1960, pp. 117)⁵ whose interdependence presupposed that there was a place for all of them. But how to adjust to the new aspirations of peoples and also claim to offer a podium to all of them, in a world marked by cultural, social and ethnic prejudices? A world where, moreover, the great powers presented themselves as emblems of civilisation and its principles of justice, while at the same time appropriating the planet as a field for their confrontations, endangering populations which had long become invisible and were reduced to silence.

The Equality of Races and Cultures, a “Fine Theme for Speeches but Discrimination Remains”

Already mentioned in the 1930s (in the IBE’s Yearbooks and Bulletins much more than in the ICPEs), the link between the rights of peoples and the responsibilities of public powers was reinforced from the middle of the century. In fact, these rights clearly implied “the duty to provide equal access to education to all, regardless of race, sex, class or economic and social situation”, demanding of the major colonial powers that they meet this requirement so that the ponderous speechmaking would be transformed into action. “The equality of races is a fine theme for speeches but racial discrimination still remains”, as Torres Bodet, UNESCO director, asserted in 1951, he who had had tirelessly appealed for an “imperative call to action” to finally put an end to the “timidity of routine-based administrators and the temerity of demagogues” (pp. 22–23); and to confirm that it was about building a dynamic peace which would allow schools to adjust to the period’s changing context. We might even surmise that the director was calling on his audience to stop being complacent regarding the list of their country’s past successes, to project themselves into the future and to speed up the fundamental reconfiguration of education policy.

With regard to racial issues, all those who spoke were offended, but with contrasting points of view: the dominant argument (United Kingdom) was indeed to pacify people; through Barbag’s intervention,⁶ Poland seized on it to denounce chauvinism, nationalism, labour exploitation and racial discrimination in the same breath (ICPE, 1949, p. 35). The United States seemed to be among the first countries to acknowledge its responsibility, but not without generalising and diluting the problem. Indeed, in 1955, at the time of the Bandung Conference, the Afro-Asian Conference of unity against colonialism, American delegate Henri I. Willett reported on the difficulties of applying the Supreme Court’s decisions on racial segregation in his composite and decentralised country. Even though the Court had struck down all discrimination, he said that 17 out of 48 states still had laws allowing it or requiring it in public schools; some even claimed that “they would seek to maintain segregation by all legal means at their disposal”. After pointing out that “the status of the Negro has improved consistently in American life”, the delegate concluded that “the same problem exists wherever people with different cultures and backgrounds are brought together […] Even in the southern states however, the status of the Negro can be compared with the status of minority groups elsewhere in the world” (ICPE, 1955, p. 72.)⁷

Above all, this generalisation was tactical in order to avoid his country being singled out, in order to dilute the problem, or even to state the inescapable nature of segregation, when it was not to support the principle outright. Year after year, progress was reported, recognising the persistence of racial prejudice. In 1960, the US delegate⁸ stated that most states would not differentiate between white and coloured children (1960, p. 72). By 1965, the principle of integration would have been accepted in all states, and schools that refused it would now be deprived of financial support from the Federal Government (1965, p. 97).⁹ It was as if, since that date, the question of racial segregation had been settled and was no longer mentioned. This was not the case: in 1967, only 2.4% of 14-year-olds were illiterate; but a year later, it was stated¹⁰ that “statistics are no longer kept on minorities, with the exception of the Indians” (ICPE, 1968, p. 103); as was the case before. As for the Native Americans, they remained in a separate world, discriminated against under the assimilationist policies that were then strongly contested,¹¹ questions which were not tackled by the ICPEs.

The struggles of countries to combat illiteracy often revealed decades of alienation and discrimination, sometimes within a country itself. This was the case of Brazil, whose delegate, Sandra Calvalcanti, stated in 1961 that it was “until recently a country with a colonial economy and an importing mentality”: there were still two Brazils, one industrialised and, thanks to its schools and universities, composed of a cultivated population, and the other, “somewhat forgotten”, where the mostly illiterate and underprivileged populations resided (60% of the country’s inhabitants) (ICPE, 1961, p. 76). Hence the call, which was heard, for adult literacy which the IBE would relay especially from the 1960s onwards (a 1965 survey was specifically dedicated to it) (Image 22.1).

Image 22.1

Natal’s answers to the IBE inquiry about the situation of married women as teachers (1932). IBE organised international surveys from 1927 on, in this same year together with the ILO on child labour. The IBE invited as many countries as possible to participate, including provinces in federal states, and some colonies. (© IBE)

The Colonies: From Invisibilisation to a Raising of Awareness

Henceforth, in the precincts of the ICPEs, there were also the injunctions of the UN requiring empires to clarify their position with regard to their colonies and dominions, while the mandate states had to gradually bring the territories entrusted to them to self-government.¹² It even cited the imperative for all states party to the UN Covenant to establish a plan of action

to achieve the full implementation of the principle of compulsory primary education for all […] providing all the children in their territories with free and compulsory primary education without distinction of race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. (Torres Bodet, 1951, p. 26)

As the number of delegates from countries that had gained their independence multiplied, and this was systematically welcomed, the Western empires now included in their annual reports the educational situation of the territories still under their control. A gap was opened up discreetly at first to evoke these regions presented as distant, little known and underdeveloped, with indigenous populations readily described as savage or even rebellious, the objects above all of projections and fantasies.

Circumscribed both by their distance and by their radical otherness, this Other became more present over the years. Their figure, previously undifferentiated, had taken on more precise and more diversified contours. Delegates were now called upon to problematise ethnic issues and to recognise the sovereignty and self-determination of peoples. And this was done with real people, from the peoples who had won their independence, who now sat alongside them, in the very councils, assemblies and receptions of the IBE.

Literacy for the masses was no longer just a supposedly disinterested social and humanitarian cause but was seen as an investment to increase and intensify growth, as schools must adjust to the needs of the economic world that transcends borders. While awareness of the interdependence between peoples and the link between economic development and literacy was growing, a half-spoken threat could be perceived: mistrust of the possible outbursts of the claims of the dangerous working classes now encompassed these populations, which were still considered immature, savage and untameable, and which needed to be accompanied in order to help them “rise” and join the civilised world. Without endangering the so-called developed, if not to say civilised, countries.

Behind a relatively consensual generic discourse, positions could diverge radically. In 1951 Portugal, for example, considered that it “was one of the countries which had most successfully dealt with the problem of compulsory primary education”, and asked rhetorically if there was “not room, alongside the complex beings who needed to be educated to the utmost limits of their abilities, for the common, plain man”. And the delegate Antonio Ferro, Portuguese minister plenipotentiary, continued in 1951:

Alongside the man of knowledge, should there not eternally be found the man of feeling, with a minimum of instruction, and of strong instinct. […] Would it not be as well to remember the purely spiritual and imponderable things that maritime and all other great civilisations can offer? (pp. 71–72, italics in the source)

This was Portugal, whose colonising enterprise,¹³ as we have already shown,¹⁴ would cause the most serious conflict which the IBE had to face in the ICPEs, endangering its own survival.

Discussions of annual country reports to the Yearbook regularly provided details of the educational situation of peoples either migrant, indigenous, colonised and/or on the road to independence. From the mid-1950s onwards, the data was documented and problematised.

For example, Belgium responded to questions about education in the Belgian Congo¹⁵ by pointing out, just before independence, that “desegration in Belgian Congo schools, which was begun in 1948 with half-castes, has been continuing steadily since 1952 with natives”. He then rejoiced that the “conditions of entrance for African children to schools formerly for Europeans have been progressively broadened, so that nowadays any child who fulfils the general requirements for entrance is eligible for admission” (ICPE, 1959, pp. 67).¹⁶ In other words, the Belgian delegate proudly announced that “the mention of two communities at the basis of the introduction of a dual educational system in the Belgian Congo, namely, a European and a native community, with their respective ways of life and intellectual standards, is now merely a historical fact” (p. 68).

In his report on the Congo in 1961, the delegate from Brazzaville, the former secretary of state for Youth and Sport, Jean Biyoudi, stated that, following independence, the programmes had to be modified to better adapt them to the country’s needs and resources (1961, p. 50). Everything happened as if every initiative were translated into progress, according to a logic that eluded barely perceptible conflicts because the delegates reappropriated the logics of discourse and the expected principles of justice: reconciling peoples, ensuring the benefits of a common schooling for all while adjusting to the specificities of communities.

Between Resilience and Community of Suffering?

Encouraged in this by the ICPEs’ logic which aimed to enhance successful experiences so that others could benefit from them, some countries, such as Uruguay, boasted that they could not be faulted, the duties of states being all the more easily assumed because, according to its delegate, the country had never experienced any indigenous, racial or religious problems (ICPE, 1951, p. 81).¹⁷ Others, recently independent, were working assiduously to rehabilitate their traditions and cultures, as soon as they were admitted to the IBE, but not without pointing out the inadequacy of concepts imported from the West:

Universal education existed in countries with an agricultural civilization like old Vietnam. One hundred years ago, there was a school in each village or at least in each canton of the country. […] to be a complete man, one had to be an educated man. The Western notion of compulsory education had no more sense for the Vietnamese than compulsory eating, drinking and breathing. (1958, p. 65)

The Vietnamese delegate¹⁸ continued to emphasise the fundamentally peaceful nature of his people’s culture, which was reflected in their history and tradition, as well as their peaceful relations with their neighbours. This might even go so far as to assert that relations with their former colonisers were free of hostility, while more subtly demonstrating the extent to which independence had rehabilitated the rights of each. Tunisia,¹⁹ for example, reported that it now offered equal education to girls and boys and that it had fundamentally redesigned its curricula without showing any aggression towards the previous ones, imposed by the colonial power (p. 44).

How could one express oneself without being accused of engaging in a head-on²⁰ political conflict in the hushed atmosphere that this fraternal parliament should be, and that the Good of childhood would transcend? After the Second World War, Mexico’s strategy was to show solidarity between peoples who had experienced similar tragedies. Rather than denouncing oppression, its representative showed cultural openness, broadmindedness and a community of suffering with all those who had suffered tragedies:

[Mexico] had received her tradition from Spain, her inspiration from France and was in communion with the peoples of the Orient through similar tragic experiences. […] Mexico forms part of a large continent, full of resources and readily welcomes the peoples of suffering Europe. (1947, p. 90)²¹

Evoking a distant past and successes would also testify to such resilience. This was the view Mongolia expressed, whose delegate in 1962 emphasised the ability of the country in achieving literacy for its people through a left-wing policy once it had gained its independence over 40 years previously:

Before the revolution in Mongolia, the people lived in poverty and hunger and their cultural standards were extremely low. Under such circumstances, there could not be a uniform system of public education. The number of literate people made up a very small percentage of the whole population. […] It was only after the revolution in 1921 and the establishment of a people’s democracy that the rapid development of Mongolia’s economy and culture were secured. (p. 114)

We can see that a political position, in itself, seemed less muzzled, if it did not offend others, in this case the imperialism of the great powers. The voices seemed to become freer over the years, depending on the history of the peoples and the issues addressed. In 1968, the voice of Awono Félix Tsala, the director of the teacher training college in Cameroon, expressed his difficulty in building the cohesion of his people who had been torn apart, after independence had been sought and then won under the armed influence of the West and at the cost of fratricidal wars between regions under tutelage that were themselves locked in struggle (Great Britain, France). The denunciation is clear. Its outcome: ruralising the population again and “checking the rate of educational development in the south in order to foster it in the Northern Regions”, since the country must be developed in a harmonious fashion (p. 116). Thus would the cultural unification of the country be built. In other words, in order to assume its independence and rebuild the unity of its country destabilised by the unbridled colonisations of the great so-called civilised empires, Cameroon unhesitatingly asserted that it needed to put a stop to the schooling of certain populations. This was quite extraordinary in an assembly that considered schooling to be an emblem of peace and emancipation, and had never ceased to work towards it against all odds.

Some states thus used this audience to bear witness to the insults suffered under the impact of the great empires and during the wars. The great divisions of the world were reproduced and problematised as such.

The Debt the West Owes to the East and the South

It was in the context of international financial aid—that is, of objectively identifiable problems—that voices were more openly expressed in defence of the most deprived peoples and even in denunciation of unjustly suffered aggression.

Following on from earlier debates (1955) and decisions taken in UN bodies, in 1957 the director of UNESCO, Luther Evans, pleaded for urgent international financial assistance (loans, grants, in the form of bilateral or multilateral agreements) (p. 28). The Israeli delegate asked for an international fund to be set up with contributions from all nations, under the aegis of the United Nations. Already accepted in 1955, this request for international aid was adopted without the slightest reservation in the recommendation on school buildings, one of the main causes of the IBE, since it concerned school buildings and the basic material infrastructure of any school. It was stated that these so-called soft loans would be emphasised for countries with the greatest shortage of schools. Technical assistance to “underdeveloped countries” was planned, with the participation of UNESCO experts from South-East Asia, the Middle East and Africa.²² The analysis of the results of such initiatives, which were also critical, is now well documented and remains highly topical in social and scientific terms.²³

Far from being satisfied with condescending aid, fed by pity, which contained the pitfall of reproducing the logics of power that it was supposed to curb, the argument to justify this support sent Western countries back to the injustice on the basis of which they had built their wealth and power. They received their divided view of the world in return, a boomerang that made them responsible for it and for the consequences. In 1957, the delegate from Iran emphasised how timely the help of UNESCO and the United Nations was in the fight against illiteracy, which was close to 80% (ICPE, 1957, p. 96). Ali Djamalzadeh acted as the spokesperson for the poor countries of the East, demanding a redistributive justice that considered this financial aid to be the repayment of a debt, while problematising “the cultural aspect of this aid to so-called underdeveloped countries”:

If under-developed countries were poor today, it was because they had remained agricultural and their production had made it possible for European countries to advance. Tribute should be paid to the science and efforts of the rich countries, but the decisions which they were now being asked to take in relation to the under-developed countries should not be regarded as flowing from a feeling of pity but one of justice. […] It meant giving back to under-developed countries what was due to them, at least, in part. Iran required 45,000 small schools in an equal number of scattered villages. In helping to build them rich countries would be merely doing a duty.²⁴

Was it once more to stick to a fraternal discourse that a tribute was paid to science and to countries that had become rich? Did addressing the problem by highlighting its cultural stakes mean avoiding the accusation of having summoned its political dimension? Nevertheless, this was an uncompromising argument, which demanded that the West pay a debt to the poorer countries on which it had based its power, without denying the pillaging they had suffered. A detailed serial analysis of all the comments shows a progressive evolution of the discourses. Shared expressions are voiced, and “common denominators” presented as such are outlined, built by aggregation and sedimentation. The expressions in vogue in other organisations and the results of the social sciences were more regularly called upon, as if the Conferences were progressively opening up to other worlds, or that this forum, which had long been deliberately conceived to remain preserved from external interference, was now endeavouring to echo the expectations of the social world, even in its contradictions.

“An Unfortunate Human Race” Clinging to a Little Rock

The last ICPEs bear witness to this. While the one held in 1968 had as its theme apparently the most consensual topic possible—international understanding, the very basis of the IBE and UNESCO—several speakers, and not the least prestigious, adopted positions that were akin to manifestos. For example, the socialist André Chavanne, head of the Ministry of Education in the Canton of Geneva and who led the Swiss delegation, was well known for his flamboyant speeches. As president of the 1968 ICPE Chavanne called for educational policies to resonate with the legitimate demands of the student movements, arguing that the IBE should be more in tune with the social world:

In all countries in which they have demonstrated, the young people have raised two vital questions in an urgent manner: “Isn’t the world you adults propose to us an absurd world, is it not an unjust one?” […] absurd, that is to say, is there not a contradiction between what you say and what you do? […] unjust to the extent to which the unheard-of evolution brought about by science and techniques benefits only a few countries while many others literally suffer from them. They have asked it […] about all the points where war and sometimes atrocious war is being waged on this planet, on this little rock. […] And the young, who have not lived through the circumstances in which this new world was created, ask us – as well they might: “What are you doing to the human race, this human race in which we shall live? What shall we be in the year 2000, when we have taken your places and are the people responsible? Are you sending us into a world in which people will continue to kill each other, into a world of war?” (p. 53)

We must emphasise how this physicist, a former secondary school teacher, also knew how to captivate his audience with metaphors that relativised these same social conflicts. From his presidential seat, Chavanne insisted that there is “only one human race”, inviting his audience to rise above the “little rock that can be circled in 90 minutes […] thrown into the set of stars […] on which this ‘unfortunate human race’ is clinging”. And to conclude with a fervent plea for “the right of peoples to have peace, to develop without having to hate each other, without having to detest other peoples” (p. 38).

Rather than leaving the last word to the responsible bodies (UNESCO, IBE, successive presidencies) which competed with each other in their zeal to preserve the consensus, and legitimise their modus operandi and the causes on their agenda, let us give the floor to the delegate from Cuba. Not only because these are also the conclusions of the last ICPE included in our corpus, the final one under Piaget’s leadership; but above all because she wisely expressed the impasse of a single catechisation of the ideal of international understanding, that internationalist mystique already evoked by Butts and Piaget in the early 1930s. In 1968, the dissenting voice of Cordelia Navarro Garcia resolutely challenged the idyllic representation of the world in school curriculums. This enabled her to denounce what she still considered to be the shameless alienation of oppressed peoples, who were thus deluded, and whose strength of resistance would then be weakened, leaving room for the renewal of abusive imperialist exploitation. She stated that “her delegation shared fully mankind’s aspirations for international understanding, the respect of human rights and the establishment of true and honourable peace”. But she immediately took exception to the recommendations adopted:

the document […] was not equal to their desired objective and that if it were to become an integral part of the school curriculum, without reservations, it would evoke in the minds of pupils an idyllic conception of the world we live in and would create illusions among developing countries about the role played in the international field by world organisations mentioned in it; the consequence would be a slackening of the spirit of struggle and endeavour among peoples. […] for the least two-thirds of mankind, still in a state of underdevelopment as a result of colonial exploitation, it would not be possible to insist on the full and complete respect for human rights and international understanding until the last vestiges of such exploitation had been removed. (ICPE, 1968, p. 129)

Thus, Cordelia Navarro Garcia justified her abstention from the vote on the recommendations on international understanding. This political stance can be interpreted not as a disagreement with the IBE’s main goal of global solidarity but as a denunciation of the imperialist and therefore socio-economic and political arguments that underpin the rhetoric and even the action programmes of international organisations.

She was thanked for explaining the reasons for her abstention.