Françoise LAOT, Université Paris Descartes - Cerlis, France

This paper uses the study of a film to re-visit the history of a national adult education policy in relation to the international context. The film “Retour à l’école?” (Return to school?) was shot in a French university centre for adults in Nancy in 1966. It was financed in the framework of France’s participation in the International congress on Educational TV, which was held in Paris in March 1967 , and included adult education for the first time. Only male participants were interviewed in evening courses that had been established in the context of a social promotion policy in France in 1959. They described their experiences as adults “returning to school”. Three of them were filmed at home with their “spouse” and she was asked to express her opinion about her husband’s desire to achieve work advancement by participating in a programme of PST (Promotion supérieure du travail). The film translated in images a specific discourse about adult learning, shaped by the first research on adult pedagogy, which considered that the social and family entourage was largely responsible for the participants’ strong drop out rate. This film is thus a precious testimony of contemporary attitudes about adult education. The film analysis reveals in particular that the policy of social promotion did not include women. Single or married women, mothers, whether employed or not, were totally left-out and not considered potential recipients of PST programmes, despite their increasing numbers in the 1960s labour market. However, as “spouses”, they were supposed to play a major role in the success of this policy by encouraging their husbands to pursue studies. Policy makers included plans to organize a training programme for spouses in order to help them to support their husband. After the events of 1968 May in France, women nonetheless registered more and more frequently in PST programmes. It is interesting to see how this shift occurred in the context of profound changes affecting the status of women as well as shifting attitudes toward women’s work. My exploration in public archives of the institutions in charge of adult education policy in the 60’s has revealed that in 1967 the official discourse radically changed: women suddenly emerged as participants and even became a priority in social promotion policy. This paper will focus especially on the international influences, which contributed to this change. In addition to the congress, which was grounds for the film, it will analyse two important events: - A Unesco demand for a report on women’s promotion which forced state agents to admit that earlier policies had ignored them. - An international trade union conference set in Italy in February 68 which elaborated a Charter of professional training and which highlighted women’s special needs in training.

Frontières linguistiques et diffusion pédagogique. La réception française des travaux de Pierre Bovet sur le scoutisme 1912-1939

Dès sa fondation en 1911, le scoutisme français illustre la réception complexe de l’initiative anglaise du scouting. L’adaptation française de cette éducation physique et morale imite la vie des trappeurs et des soldats coloniaux. Mais elle met volontairement à distance son modèle anglais. Les Eclaireurs de France refusent en effet de traduire l'ouvrage fondateur de Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for boys (1908.) Le nationalisme des Eclaireurs de France défend vigoureusement les frontières hexagonales. Il ignore notamment la traduction française du livre due au Genevois Pierre Bovet sous le titre Eclaireurs (1912.) L’association publie alors son propre manuel de pédagogie de l’aventure, Le livre de l’Eclaireur, dans lequel elle revendique une farouche indépendance vis-à-vis du pédagogue britannique. Pendant les années de l’Entre-deux-guerres, l’analyse savante du scoutisme déploie sa dynamique dans un triangle anglo-franco-genevois. Au moment où s’organise l’internationale scoute sous direction anglo-saxone, Pierre Bovet reprend son travail en publiant le génie de Baden-Powell (1923.) Cette analyse savante suit notamment la publication de L’instinct combatif (1917) dans lequel l’auteur expliquait le rôle de l’affrontement dans l’affirmation de l’adolescence. Les traductions françaises de Baden-Powell portent alors le sceau de l’Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Genève permet la rencontre intellectuelle entre la pédagogie scoute et l’éducation nouvelle. Au même moment, les Eclaireurs de France sont engagés conjointement dans le mouvement scout international et dans l’Ecole publique où ils prennent pied au sein des écoles normales d’instituteurs. Mais les travaux genevois sont accueillis dans l’indifférence. Les Eclaireurs s’ouvrent à l’éducation anglo-saxonne mais dressent un barrage solide à l’analyse savante. La frontière défendue est désormais celle du merveilleux de la pédagogie scoute. Ils éprouvent une gêne évidente vis à vis de la mise à distance de leur programme. Ceci est d’autant plus vrai que le cursus de formation de leurs cadres au camp-école du château de Cappy (Picardie) est solidement établi et contribue à leur rayonnement dans le champ éducatif français. L’essor des Eclaireurs autour de l’enceinte scolaire repose-t-elle davantage sur la pratique que sur la pensée? Cette distance avec les écrits savants conditionne-t-elle l’essor du scoutisme français? Ce travail tiré de notre thèse d’histoire culturelle soutenue en 2010 s’appuie sur le dépouillement des publications EDF et de leur revue des cadres Le Chef (1922-1940.) Il prend aussi en compte les publications des éditions Delachaux et Niestlé, liées aux traductions de l’IJJR pendant cette période. Nous proposons de développer la question en trois parties chrono-thématiques: 1) garder la frontière (1911-1917), 2) faire circuler les idées (1917-1932) et 3) l’impossble mise a distance (1932-1940).

Transpacific Girl Scouts Movement in the Early 20th Century: The Case of the Girl Scouts Organization in Japan

This case study presents some new insights into interwar voluntary organizations from the trans-Pacific perspective, using mainly the case of the Japanese Girl Scouts. As is suggested by Allen Warren in the foreword of Scouting Frontiers: Youth and the Scout Movement’s First Century (2009), to present scouting movements in a global context is very much to be welcomed, because few scholars have tried to understand them outside a single local or national context. This paper will argue that the early period of the Girl Scouts of Japan can be seen in part as an episode in Americanization and trans-Pacific relations. Though the Girl Scouts (Girl Guides as called in Britain) was an organization of British origin and in the 1920s the Japanese Girl Scouts was established by British female missionaries of Anglican Church, it would shortly have close contacts with the Girl Scouts of USA (GS-USA). The acceptance and subsequent popularity of the Girl Scouts reflected widespread Americanization of Japanese city life, although it domesticated American Girl Scouting and tried to remake it as a Japanese gender entity. In fact, The Girl Scouts was a part of the Progressive movement that represented various efforts to solve problems arising from urbanization and industrialization in both Japan and the U.S. Exchanges between the Girl Scouts of Japan and GS-USA were actively carried out, as exemplified by bilateral crossing of the Pacific by Girl Scout personnel and Japanese-American Girl Scouts. The Girl Scouts of Japan was thus part of a trans-Pacific form of Progressivism. This will be demonstrated by materials quoted from The Rally (and later The American Girls), the GS-USA bulletin, and from Jyoshi-Hodo-Binran, the bulletin of The National Association of Girl Scouts in Japan. But this reciprocal contact with American Progressivism did not last. In the 1930s, in a larger political context, with deepening Japanese militarization, the voluntary Girl Scout organization was forced to transform itself into a militaristic association. And, exchanges with the GS-USA eventually stopped as a result of worsened U.S.–Japan relations. The histories of the Japanese Girl Scouts diverged from the American model. The rise of militarism took the Girl Scouts on a new path in which they came to be utilized consciously as a cultural agent for supporting the Japanese Empire in eastern Asia and the South Sea Islands. In this sense, the Girl Scouts was a trans-Pacific social movement, too. This will be proved by records quoted from Jyoshi-Hodo-Binran ,and from some bulletins of several Girl Scouts associations in East Asian countries. Historians such as D.T. Rogers in his book Atlantic Crossings (1998) have already told the story of American Progressivism as a North Atlantic one. Nevertheless, it did extend well beyond the North Atlantic; it was also a trans-Pacific movement, demonstrated in the case of Girl Scouts as a part of the Progressive movements.

Education projects regarding communism and anticommunism for the Greek Civil War children during the cold war period

The beginning of the Cold War had been connected for the Greeks with a civil war between government’s troops, backed by the United Kingdom and United States, and rebel forces, the military branch of the Greek Communist Party. The Greek children had been the most tragic victims in the maelstrom of the civil war and afterwards, during the cold war. Having been expatriated from their homelands during the warfare, one group consisted by more or less 28,000 children, had been moved to the Communist countries by the rebels and accommodated in “children’s homes” of People's Democracies (Danforth, Van Boeschoten, 2011). A second group of children, numbered from 18,000 to 23,000, had been evacuated by the Greek government forces and transferred in Queen’s camps, which had been constituted in several areas of Greece ad hoc for the resettlement of them (Vervenioti, 2010: 121). For those two groups of children, two different networks of Greek or Greek language education had been created, providing, at the same time, diametrically opposite types of political socialization and culturalization through boarding schooling (Bontila, 2004, Hassiotis, 2011, 273-274). The versions of a “good communist” in a socialist society and of “virtuous patriot” in a society strongly opposed to communism had been dominant representations of the two contradictive educational projects, respectively (Voutira, Brouskou, 2000). Our research, aiming at identifying similarities and differences between an education project intended to cultivation of socialist consciousness and a completely opposite one, which intended to cultivate nationalism, anti-communism and dynastic loyalty, studied the concept, structure, syllabus and textbooks of those projects by using the qualitative content analysis. According to Gramsci’s theory, the main objective for society’s democratic transformation was the creation of “Hegemony” throughout the educational mechanisms. Our study uses the Gramsci’s aspect of “Hegemony” as an interpretative instrument for the understanding of the data derived from our research. From a historical comparative point of view, the projects were attempted to be integrated in relation to the dominant ideological conflict in the Cold War period, while from pedagogical approach, the focus put on the paths of systematic indoctrination. The research results show clear similarities in the way of educating the children in both groups, such as institutionalization, the emergence of patrons for children, the depreciation of the value of family, the systematic manipulation. On the other hand, royal camps attempted to train the children to occupy specific inferior professional roles, while communist camps had been committed to polytechnic education. Interpretation of the results allowed for suggestions and highlighted some possible directions for further research.

Books in the battlefield: literature and fight against illiteracy during the Spanish civil War

Juan Antonio GOMEZ NARANJO, University of Malaga, Spain

In spite of the fact that the Civil War (1936-1939) was a terrible period of the Spanish History, it brought a huge interest about the development of culture and the fight against illiteracy. Most of the soldiers were illiterate, and the Republican government realized how important their education was in order to understand the deep reasons to defend the Republic and to fight against the growing fascism. As a consequence, an organization was created, Milicias de la Cultura, to bring culture to the soldiers. The battlefield filled up with adult schools; the foxholes were full of itinerant libraries; the soldiers had a gun in a hand and a book in the other. But… what books did they read? Were they a simple amusement or a governmental tool of ideology? Among these books we can find plenty of subjects and topics: from classical European and American novels, to politics books from the biggest revolutionaries; from technical handbooks to Spanish classic books. In the next pages we are going to analyze what European ideas and feelings were assumed by the Republican soldiers by reading these books. Also we will remark the important presence in the battlefield, and in the soldiers’ minds, of a group of important thinkers of the European history and Revolutions. Finally, we will observe how different thoughts and ideas imbued Europe through many different books until they reached the ideology of the Republican soldiers.

“To build a better and more responsible moral character”: The Organization for the Moral Rearmament of Youth in post-war Greece

Vassiliki VASSILOUDI, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece; Vassiliki THEODOROU, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece

In post-war Greece the moralization of childhood and youth had been extensively dealt with by educationalists, politicians and scholars. Despite the victory of the conservatives at the end of the Greek Civil War (1949), anxieties about the spread of the communist ideology among the young, instead of diminishing, intensified during the following decades as the youth had played a crucial role in the civil conflict. Concerns about its moral armoring against the communist effect can be traced among the aims of various voluntary organizations as well as in the educational policies implemented by the governments in 1950s. Previous studies have focused on the role legislation and the curricula played in the political indoctrination of youth. However, as far as the emergent model of child and youth (the nationalist child) during this period is concerned, a lot of questions with regard to the persons and networks that contributed to its formation still remain open. Our paper presents the framework within which during the 1950s George Sakellariou developed his work as well as his contribution to the politicization and moralization of childhood, based on scientific tools. George Sakellariou, professor of Psychology at the University of Athens, proposed a method of moral and political indoctrination for children, using the methods of developmental psychology. Influenced by the American school of psychology, he set up the Organization for the Moral Rearmament of Youth which aimed to build a truly moral and intelligent character. According to the method of moral uplift, invented by him, students learned how to undergo self-examination in order to give up bad habits, attitudes and views while their parents and school inspectors acquired an objective criterion by which to record the average progress of students in character building week by week. According to Sakellariou, his method, implemented not only in schools, summer camps, reformatories, prisons and centers for the moralization of youth but also within the family, was to contribute to the ethical evolution in short time and to the shielding of youth against communism. Our paper, then, looks into how an educational-psychological tool, transplanted from America into a different national context - Sakellariou himself had applied his method in Cleveland, Ohio - was used as a tool for ideological repression and how the concept of childhood is formed during political upheavals.