A cornerstone of international education is international mindedness. One of the dimensions of an international education that distinguishes it from other approaches is not just the fact that children are learning with peers from all over the world but that the significance of this is brought across educationally in an intentional fashion. A good international school will also do whatever it can to diversify its staff so that this international experience is not just at the level of student socialisation but modelled by the faculty and expressed through the pedagogical culture too.
It’s important to remember that when the International School of Geneva was opened, the concept of nationalism was extreme: it had led to a devastating and futile world war and had found itself incarnated in the form of fascism, a violent, exceedingly nationalistic doctrine which emerged during WW1. In 1924, the concept of internationalism was a counter discourse to what had in many ways become a norm and this was ideated and drawn up in the idealism of the world’s first international organisations which were all born around that time: the League of Nations, the International Bureau of Education and the International Labour Office.
Paul Dupuy1, an iconic and charismatic teacher of the early days, who had an illustrious career at the Ecole Normale Supérieur in Paris beforehand and was a considerable intellectual and social activist (notably as a Dreyfusard, fighting to clear Dreyfus’ name in the infamous anti-Semitic Dreyfus affair) described the International School’s relationship to the League of Nations in dramatic, poetic and even Hegelian terms:
"The International School has hope founded on faith, and it is this hope and this faith that gathers us here today, at the threshold of a new school year. The hope is one which, born amongst ruins, loomed out of the worst of disasters humanity has known, took hold of President Wilson’s great soul, raised it, penetrated it, became its principle of action, and –in spite of doubt, sarcasm, suspicion, hostility –gave birth to the international organism, already so vigorous, in whose shade we hope our school will grow."
Here are some of the practices that marked the International School out from other schools in 1924:
A transnational identity
As the scholar Leonora Dugonjic-Rodwin points out, adroitly, in her article A miniature League of Nations: Inquiry into the social origins of the International School, 1924-1930, up until 1924, private schools had either been religious institutions or charitable organisations, usually named after a founding father or denomination. Ecolint from the start anchored its identity, like the League of Nations, in a supra-national sphere, hence the term “international”. The strong adherence to the League of Nations is what led to the creation of the world’s first model United Nations at the International School of Geneva in 1953.
No school uniforms
This was to allow students to wear their national dress. The practice of wearing uniforms, which goes back to at least the Middle Ages as a way of identifying a group with a Livery, was standard practice, so it was fairly unusual for a school to break away from this. Unlike educational models seeking to standardise the student experience, the idea was to celebrate differences and to let students wear the costumes that conveyed their cultures.
School assemblies on global affairs
School assemblies were an important part of the early days and they would cover international events, stimulating students to remain informed about the world around them and not merely locked in the parameters of their national confines. During the 1930s with the mounting of Nazism in Europe, Marie-Thérèse Maurette’s convictions about the moral dimension of the war went beyond assemblies as she became actively involved in providing shelter to Jewish refugees and with another great Ecolint figure, Bill Oats, even taking a group of students across the channel out of fear of a Nazi invasion. Maurette’s political convictions (she was an outspoken Communist towards the end of her tenure) meant that at one point during her assemblies students received almost daily accounts of Mao ZeDong’s Long March. Indeed, the balance between a politically responsive educational discourse and a politically biased account is a fine one to strike as the former can quickly bleed into the latter, which is why so many schools steer clear of politics altogether. However, the International School didn’t hide away from the world around it, even if this meant occasionally that the convictions and passions - and therefore predilections - of its administrators would come to the surface.
An international curriculum
From the start the school used the two languages of international diplomacy practised at the League of Nations (French and English), there was an emphasis on international history and geography whereas the teaching style brought together pedagogical practices from America, France, Germany and Switzerland. However, students were prepared for national examinations, as these were all that existed at the time, and they would choose between the “College Board Examination, the Cambridge entrance exam, the Canadian matriculation, the French baccalaureate and the Swiss maturité” (Dugonjić, 2014, p.149). This situation lasted until the late 1960s when the school would be central in designing the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme, an explicitly international curriculum, which today is taught in thousands of schools worldwide. What exactly is meant by an international curriculum is a longer discussion of course, but from the start at the International School of Geneva there was an understanding that, broadly speaking, it should be a curriculum that would stimulate international mindedness, in other words, curiosity and learning of different national cultures.
In conclusion, the whole discussion about what exactly makes an international school international is a long one and has been exercised by scholars for decades. What the story of the origins of international education shows us is that there are a handful of approaches that are essential. I’ve noticed a number of “international schools” open over the years with a decidedly nationalist approach, culturally and nationally homogenous staff, little if any effort made to be bilingual or multilingual, national curricula and more of an elite private school ethos than an international one. Are these really international schools? If not, they can be by going back to the source and bringing into the fold the principles discussed in this article.
A few years ago, you would hear at conferences that “internationalism” is a thing of the past and that we should be focussing on interculturalism instead, because international cooperation was a given and students lived beyond their national identities. How untrue, and how unfortunate that this is untrue: the interstate conflicts raging across various parts of the world, the strong nationalist sentiment fuelling xenophobic policy and the narrow definition of people according to their national status touted by right wing politicians not to mention the difficulties presented to people living with certain passports and not others concerning visa rights and global mobility is still very real, and this is why international mindedness is by no means a given, it is a journey we have to keep taking together for a better world.
Conrad Hughes
Director General
1 Dupuy, P. (1925). “L’Esprit international à École Internationale de Genève”, Pour l’ère nouvelle: pp. 3–5