The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 and the unification of Germany and Italy not only changed the political map of Europe, but meant that the study of geography became of vital importance in this exercise, for the subject was intrinsically linked to political messaging. The scramble for Africa and acceleration of colonialism further intensified this: late 19th Century geography textbooks were steeped in racism, pseudoscientific ideas and the aggressive nationalistic notions of thinkers like Compte, Hegel and De Gobinneau.
Hence, the pages of history and geography textbooks were imbued with ideological messaging on war, expansion, and compulsory education was not just a humanitarian act to protect children from exploitation and give them access to knowledge, it was also a way of formatting generations’ minds, filling them with nationalist sentiment.
The pedagogy of the late 1800s, satirised in the fiction of Charles Dickens, was built on two principles: factual regurgitation and corporal punishment.
So early compulsory education was not built on human flourishing and peace, it was built on conformity and violence.
As the title of a book by the geographer Yves Lacoste, which caused a stir in the 1970s, says: "Geography is primarily used to wage war."
The early 1900s
As nationalism and the educational machine grew in power and reach, philosophers and educators started to publish thoughts on a different approach to learning: Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget, John Dewey. All of these thinkers were influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's theories on education, that the psychology of the learner needed to be taken into consideration and that rote learning was superficial and soon forgotten. Rousseau was a political thinker too and advocated for a social contract theory whereby the government would be accountable to the people. The goal of education and social institutions was to protect human freedoms and to stimulate critical thinking.
Rousseau saw human nature as fundamentally good: inside each of us is a yearning to be free, to reconnect with our innocent and life-affirming inner selves. The purpose of an education is to tap into that energy and to allow it to grow.
1924-1925
After WW1, a group of philosophers and educators came together to create the world’s first international school. They were Ludwik Raichjman, the Polish bacteriologist, who would also set up UNICEF; Arthur Sweetser, who worked for the League of Nations; Adolphe Ferrière, pioneer of active education from the Rousseau Institute; and Paul Meyhoffer. The following year, the International Bureau of Education was established by members of the Rousseau Institute. What was the vision of these early pioneers, what did they hope to achieve by an International Education?
First, an education for peace, whereby children of different nationalities, belief systems, cultures and languages would grow together in the name of peace and learn the language of international diplomacy
Second, an education based on Rousseauvian pedagogical theories where student learning was at the centre, what would be learnt would not be simply memorised off by heart but problematised and discussed. Early photographs show teachers sitting with students rather than standing above them, co-constructing knowledge rather than dictating it.
Marie Therese Maurette, the school’s second director, published a pamphlet on international mindedness with UNESCO to describe Ecolint’s position.
Géographie mondiale et Histoire universelle sont le patrimoine commun de tous les hommes, ignoré, hélas, de la majorité d'entre eux. Si vous voulez que leurs pensées se rencontrent, élevez-les dans la même "maison humaine"[...]. C'est par un effort constant, dans tous les domaines, littéraires, artistiques, musicaux, scientifiques, que nous essayons de meubler leur imagination du patrimoine humain. (Maurette 7)
Je reste convaincue que de la présentation de la Géographie et de l'Histoire dépend, en grande partie, la possibilité de penser "universel", donc international. C'est l'un des moyens les plus efficaces pour tuer ce terrible soutien des nationalismes étroits et belliqueux, l'orgueil national, enraciné dès l'enfance dans la profondeur de l'inconscient. (Maurette 13)
Indeed, a group of academics from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris were seeking to reverse the trend of history and geography as instruments of state propaganda and war. One of these thinkers was Paul Dupuy, one of Ecolint’s first and greatest teachers.
Maurette also made remarkable reflections on bilingualism:
Cela marque notre façon de penser, surtout s'il s'agit de langues dont les génies sont aussi différents que le français et l'anglais. Langue latine, déductive et analytique, où la preuve doit être conduite de paragraphe logique en paragraphe logique, d'une conséquence déduite à une autre. Langue anglo-saxonne, synthétique et condensatrice où les mots-images se substituent souvent au raisonnement, où l'on peut juxtaposer les choses jusqu'au point où la conclusion sort de l'agglutination, comme, un diable d'une boîte. Littératures sorties de ces méthodes diverses de pensée et d'expression, l’une explicite et fouilleuse, l'autre évocatrice et paysagiste. Tournures d'esprit, créées par ces habitudes, qui s'affrontent et s'opposent, fermées aux méthodes l'une de l'autre, dans maintes discussions internationales.
Mais dès qu'un individu pratique vraiment les deux langues, il pratique les deux modes de pensée. En tous cas, il comprend le mode de pensée de son interlocuteur. Il n'est plus étonné et hostile. Et dès qu'il y a compréhension et familiarité, la possibilité d'entente est là : l'esprit international est né. Pratiquer deux langues, c'est avoir deux fenêtres ouvertes sur le même paysage, mais qui vous permettent d'en contempler deux aspects différents. (Maurette 15)
So while fascist and nationalist educational doctrines were teaching young people to believe that their nation state was greater than others, and to marvel at their own languages, students at Ecolint were considering national identity in the context of a larger international framework. They were learning two language systems in order to have a richer appreciation not only of the French and Anglo-Saxon cultural traditions, but of the nature of reality itself which is contingent on the nature of perception, framed so forcibly in language.
1953
After WW2, the brutalities of the Holocaust and Stalin’s purges, Hiroshima and Nagasaki plunged philosophy into the abyss of meaninglessness and absurdity. After centuries of high art and culture, we were capable of the most barbaric acts imaginable. The brilliant scholar George Steiner, who taught at the University of Geneva said:
We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.
Existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir spoke to a new world where there was no human essence, where all we could be sure of was our physical existence, the rest was to be invented, for better or for worse. At the same time, studies in social psychology showed the extent to which human beings are socially conditioned. The idea of agency and free will was challenged by behaviourism: Skinner’s theories of learning were based on notions of reinforcement, repetition, reward and punishment. Operant conditioning is still used to manipulate and control behaviour, in the design of slot machines and computer games for example. We could actually add to the examples of operant conditioning the whole high stakes assessment we have designed where grades function as reward or punishment stimuli.
During and just after the Second World War, there was a concerted push in the United States to do away with the broad social science approach that had been promoted by curriculum experts such as Harold Rugg, and to focus on national history. The goal was to teach Americans American history. Educational theories started to look backwards, wishing to develop obedient and unquestioning patriots.
The history textbooks of the Cold War drew the iron curtain ever more forcefully across the world, the curriculum on either side was a vehicle for propaganda and curriculum developments, such as the proliferation of STEM subjects, was driven by political ideology: the Space Race for example.
At Ecolint we stayed true to our values. Instead of learning to hate and fear other nations, we invented the Model United Nations system: children would learn the discourse of international diplomacy, how to draft and vote for resolutions. Students had to learn to represent countries other than their own. Today, hundreds of thousands of students partake in the Model United Nations system. What better way to educate for peace?
Students and teachers together built our iconic Greek Theatre.
One of the great teachers of that time was Jeanne Hersch, who taught philosophy, Latin and French. Hersch, who had studied under Karl Jaspers, fought for the rights of women and more generally for the right to hold an opinion, the right of speech and individual liberty. This is the spirit of Ecolint: a tradition of freedom of thought and expression, not mindless conditioning by ideology and politics. However, this vital individual freedom would not get in the way of friendship and respect across nations. Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations in New York and Ecolint alumnus, Bob Ray, put it this way in a speech he made some years ago: during the cold war, we would never let nation state politics come in the way of friendship. That which makes us human expresses itself so powerfully in that simple and eternal bond between two people: as Aristotle said in his Nicomachean ethics, the defining characteristic of philia, or friendship, is a reciprocal goodwill that is based on nothing more than wishing good for each other for the sake of it, without exterior motives or identification, without ideology.
1968
The Paris student uprising of 1968 called into question the whole structure of education. Students complained that they were being formatted to fit into a Middle Class power structure that would simply create docility and quietism. They took to the streets in revolt, against the system.
Postcolonial philosophers such as Franz Fanon pointed out that what was at stake was not merely a Marxist styled rebellion against the status quo, but a deep interrogation of the self: we started to become much more aware of the layers of socialised power and history embedded in our collective psychology.
Sociological theories such as Bourdieu’s pointed out that educational structures were built on economic principles of scarcity and social hierarchy.
Civil rights activists such as Steve Biko in South Africa and Angela Davis in the United States fought against the racial and socioeconomic implications of this educational hegemony, which they deconstructed not as a service to give equal opportunity to all but on the contrary, as a superstructure created to reinforce division and hierarchy based on class, race and gender.
In the late 1950s, Benjamin Bloom had authored his paradigm-shifting taxonomy, describing successively complex systems of thinking and codifying evaluation and synthesis as higher order thinking. Educators started to see the purpose of school as much more than the transmission of knowledge, it was to make young people think critically
Paul Dupuy's International History course had become a tradition at Ecolint. Students would learn across frontiers, broadening their perspectives and improving their intercultural competences. By now Ecolint had grown substantially and was graduating students to different countries every year. However, not every student’s college board or French Baccalaureate diploma would be recognised by their country’s university. The Head of History, Robert Leach, visited the Golden triangle of Universities in England to have the course recognised as an A-level. Joined by the United World Colleges movement and the United Nations International School in New York, Ecolint expanded the spirit of the international history course to a whole curriculum framework.
He could not have imagined what would develop out of that initial effort would be the International Baccalaureate, with over 5000 schools across the world.
Unlike other, narrower systems, or uniquely academic ones, the IB would educate the whole person, in her/his or their intellectual, moral and physical capabilities.
Let us not forget what Alex Peterson, the Head of Continuing Education at Oxford said of the International Baccalaureate in his book Schools Across Frontiers: it was our final and lasting contribution to the prevention of World War Three.
Today, as the school that invented the IB Diploma, it is our responsibility to stand by the original spirit of the programme, putting the core (theory of knowledge, CAS and the extended essay) at the centre of the student experience. For younger learners, whether they be in IB programmes or the ULP, it is the spirit of critical thinking, community service and inquiry that should prevail.
2014
At the turn of the 21st Century, educational systems across the world were seeking to adapt to a globalised knowledge economy, the transformation of work, the steep increase in the power of technology and a hostile forecast about the planet’s future in terms of climate change. It was becoming clear that traditional educational models, based on knowledge and technical skill, were not enough to equip young people to thrive in a complex, interconnected world facing global challenges.
However, with the rapid growth of a globalised concentration of wealth, discourses on education became increasingly transactional: the ranking of universities, the exploitation of the educational market by tech companies, multinationals buying up schools into for-profit consortia. This corporatization of education would play itself out in top down managerial structures and the borrowing of corporate language and strategies in schools.
One of our responses to recent globalisation and the fourth industrial revolution was to partner with UNESCO’s International Bureau of Education and to articulate guiding principles for learning in the 21st Century, a research-informed description of what learning is and the development of a competence-based curriculum, the ULP. In 2014, we celebrated 90 years of international education at the United Nations, our students created a Peace Manifesto.
Over recent years, we have set up an international school anti-discrimination task force, a climate protection mobility plan and an alternative transcript: the Ecolint Learner Passport.
Our history has been rich, made up of extraordinary people. The school has survived war and major historical changes, but we have always looked to article 4 of our charter:
L'activité de l'Ecole dans tous les domaines, et notamment dans celui de la pédagogie, aura pour fondement les principes de l'égalité et de la solidarité entre les peuples et de l'égale valeur de chaque être humain sans distinction de nationalité, de race, de sexe, de langue ou de religion.
2024
Ecolint’s 2024-2030 Strategic Plan is a rallying call for our community to come together as we celebrate 100 years of international education and set the stage for the next 100 years. The major challenges facing the world face Ecolint too: climate change, learning to live together peacefully, knowing how to keep abreast of innovation and ensuring that we design relevant, lifeworthy education systems.
Our plan addresses these challenges through a key concept that runs through the whole: flourishing.
It is our responsibility to fly our flag high in a world where division and polarisation are rife, the tragedy of war is all about us and our planet is in need of regeneration. Together may we stand in defence of our values, our principles and our identity. Vive l'éducation internationale, vive Ecolint.
Conrad Hughes
Director General
Works Cited
Maurette, M.T. (1948). Techniques d'Éducation à la Paix, existent-elles? Réponse à une enquête d’Unesco.
Peterson, A. D. C. (1987). Schools Across Frontiers - the story of the International Baccalaureate and the United world Colleges. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court.