Christina REIMANN, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany

[Part 1: 5.15.]

Education for International Understanding: British secondary schools, educational travel and cultural exchange, 1919-1939

A key agent for the internationalisation of education has historically centred on the travel and exchange of students and teachers across national frontiers. Travel, as a medium for instruction, has a long and fascinating history that has largely been overlooked by historians of education. In Britain, for many centuries it was the privilege of young men of means. In the inter-war period, however, it grew to become an increasingly common feature of mainstream school experience. This was achieved principally through the efforts of a host of voluntary organisations founded for the promotion of international understanding and world peace. Then, as now, the goal of fostering an international outlook was perceived to be consolidated and enhanced through programmes designed to give participants first-hand knowledge and experience of peoples, cultures and living conditions overseas. In Britain, tens of thousands of students and teachers participated in travel and exchange programmes during the inter-war years that took them to the far-flung corners of Europe, the Empire and English-speaking world. Using these programmes as a lens through which to approach the internationalisation of education, this paper provides fresh insights into the ways in which pedagogical and cultural transfer were effected during a period of intense social and political flux. Through the triangulation of documentary and archival sources along with the retrospective oral commentaries of former participants, the paper seeks to give a more nuanced description of international education in action as well as appraising the significance of educational travel and exchange for international understanding across the twentieth century.

Between cooperation and rivalry: Internationalizing education at the Pan American Union and the League of Nations

Corinne PERNET, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland

Fostering intellectual cooperation through academic exchanges between educational establishments was high among the goals of the two largest international organizations of the interwar period: the Pan American Union (established 1889) and the League of Nations. The paper will examine the stance and the measures taken by these organizations and assess to which point their enterprises ran parallel, and at which junctures and fields they started to compete with one another. Though the literature tends to describe activities in the Americas as outcomes of League initiatives, we have to be careful in taking seriously the Pan American Union's previous efforts and the Latin American protagonist' agenda at the League as well as recognize the limitations of the League's projects. Based on multiple research in several archives, this paper contributes to our understanding of the complex transatlantic interactions in the field of education.

Internationalising the English schoolchild: League of Nations teaching through extra-activities (1919-39)

Susannah WRIGHT, Oxford Brookes University, United Kingdom

The League of Nations Union was formed in towards the end of 1918, with the objects of influencing government policy and promoting the newly founded League of Nations among the English general public. Given this focus on public opinion, attention was soon focused on the use that could be made of the education system, and an Education Committee was formed in 1919. For twenty years, the Education Committee promoted what contemporaries called League of Nations teaching in English schools. Such teaching aimed to internationalise pupils, by informing them about the aims, machinery and activities of the League of Nations, and also, more broadly, to encourage them to take an interest in other countries and develop the values and behaviours required in citizens in an interconnected and peaceful world. These aims were to be achieved through teaching within the school curriculum, and also a range of extra-curricular activities which, the LNU argued, in keeping with many contemporary educationalists, were particularly appropriate for its aim of creating “a sense of world citizenship” (The New Era, August 1930, p.52). Whilst League of Nations teaching has been discussed by John Elliott and, recently, by Helen McCarthy (Elliott, 1977; McCarthy, 2011), there is scope for a more detailed analysis of the different teaching approaches adopted and the pedagogical debates of the period. This applies in particular to extra-curricular activities, which will be the focus of this presentation. Many extra-curricular activities were organised by League of Nations Union Junior Branches formed in elementary and secondary schools, but some were coordinated from LNU headquarters in London. Drawing on the records and publications of the LNU and educational periodicals of the time, an overview will be given of the work of Junior Branches, the range of extra-curricular activities undertaken, and, within the context of broader educational debates of the time, the reputed benefits of these activities as educational tools. Two activities will be considered in detail. Model Assemblies were a popular activity undertaken by many Junior Branches during the 1920s and 1930s. Participants took on the role of nation state delegates, imitating the procedures and even, where possible, the seating arrangements of the Assembly at Geneva. Nansen Pioneer Camps were organised by headquarters each summer from 1933 to 1939. English pupils mixed with young foreign leaders (and in some years foreign students) for a fortnight of woodcraft and outdoor activities combined with study of the League and international politics. A final section of the presentation will consider how successful the League of Nations Union was, through these extra-curricular activities, in internationalising pupils in English schools.

National Culture, ‘Asia,’ and the World: Japan and China in the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation in the 1930s

Takashi SAIKAWA, University of Heidelberg, Germany

This paper seeks to examine cultural assertions of Japanese and Chinese intellectuals in an international context, by focusing on intellectuals in the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC). Founded in 1922 as an advisory organization for the Council of the League of Nations, the ICIC aimed at facilitating understanding among nations through constructing an international network of intellectuals. It soon became the most representative organization for cultural exchange in the interwar period. Among the members from non-western countries, Japan and China were both the most ardent advocates and the most outspoken critics of the ICIC. On the one hand, they promoted a close relationship with the organization, but on the other hand they emphasized the significance of national culture for rebelling against the Eurocentric universalism upon which the ICIC was predicated. The backlash from Chinese and Japanese intellectuals against the ICIC’s underlying assumptions prompted the organization to shift its guiding principle from intellectual cooperation based on the presumed universality of western civilization to international cultural exchange based on the particularity of national cultures. This paper in particular examines the discourse in the ICIC in the 1930s, when the organization came to identify itself as the “league of cultures,” while Japan and China called for recognition of their respective national cultures in connection with regional concepts such as “Asia.” It argues that while Japan and China shared common motives in making cultural assertions to the ICIC under the rubric of regional concepts, their views of the content of such notions were inherently incompatible.

[Part 1: session 5.14.]

Colonial and Post-Colonial Education Policy Parallels along African Borders

People living on the border of South Africa and Botswana share a common language and mission education history, and were joined in a political union for a brief period in the nineteenth century (see Comaroff and Comaroff, 1991). Common colonial networks facilitated common goals from the early twentieth century (Kallaway, 2007 & 2009:219). But the advent of apartheid in South Africa in 1948 and independence in Botswana in 1966 resulted in a cooling of relations. Botswana’s rapid expansion of mass education ‘with … less conflict than might have been expected’ after 1966 has been the subject of analysis by institutionalists, Meyer, Nagel and Snyder (1993: 457). They see this expansion as a consequence of Botswana’s benign relationship with the colonial power, Great Britain, its use of expatriates in the immediate post-colonial period to staff the civil service, a strong economy and absence of intermediate groups who could have fostered opposition (Meyer, Nagel and Snyder: 471; see also Tabulawa in press). South Africa by contrast also developed a system of mass education during this period, but under considerably different conditions, including most notably racial inequality, repression of resistance and international isolation. A central feature of apartheid policy was the Bantustan policy which sought to create putative independent states within the borders of South Africa. Nonetheless, despite these increasingly divergent political histories, Botswana, and the South African ‘homeland’ on the Botswana border, adopted similar educational policies, strategies and approaches during the 1970s and 1980s. This would appear to confirm the institutionalist argument of greater convergence across international and national borders. And yet, there is enough evidence of differences to support the approach taken by Jurgen Schriewer that, rather than convergence, there is evidence of ‘an abstract universalism of transnationally disseminated models, which fans out into multiform structural patterns wherever such models interact in the course of their intellectual adoption of institutional implementation….’ (Schriewer 2003: 273). This paper will examine how similar ideas were linearly adopted, diffused and indigenized in these specific local contexts, by whom and with what consequences. It will examine who the principal beneficiaries were, as well as the consequences for emancipation, exclusion and resistance. The paper will draw on both primary and secondary evidence, including life history interviews.

A Biological Approach to Education in Colonial Africa: J. H. Huxley's engagement with Education in East Africa: 1929-1932

Peter KALLAWAY, University of Cape Town, South Africa

During the 1930s there is a significant shift in the debate about the nature of the curriculum in British colonial education in Africa. Above all, somewhat discreetly hidden behind the formal language of the educational documents, is the question of the challenge presented to the traditional literary/religious missionary curriculum, or even to the adaptationist debate about the need for a curriculum related to the needs of the African rural environment, by emergence of strong public debate over the necessity for science education and the need to address issues of evolution, human heredity, the nature of population growth, and the challenges presented by the race doctrines of the fascist powers in Europe. Such issues were often hidden behind the rhetoric of relevance – to family and community health care, ecological best practice and economic prosperity. In that sense, in the words of Arthur Mayhew, secretary of the Colonial Office Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies (ACEC), the debate about a biological approach to education in Africa takes on considerable significance and needs to be seen as part of the wider set of questions raised by the relationship between “Propaganda, Science and Education” in the Inter-War years. This paper seeks to explore the first major initiative by the Colonial Office relating to the shaping of the African school curriculum along these lines between 1929 and 1933 with attempts to extend science education in general and biology education in particular to a context that had been dominated by Christian missionary education. The paper explores various attempts to launch a research initiative on this issue and to promote new forms of policy related to wider development planning proposals. It explores the processes by which such policy came to be initiated and adopted by the ACEC and its subsequent promotion as official policy.

[Part 1: session 5.13.]

Global harmonization or local differentiation? The reform of European higher education systems since 1945: France, West Germany and Luxembourg