Geert THYSSEN, Faculté des Lettres, des Sciences Humaines, des Arts et des Sciences de l'Education, Luxembourg

In this paper I will compare some Belgian, German, French, Italian and Luxembourgian open-air schools and connect them to broader developments affecting similar health institutions that helped ‘internationalize’ contested and ill-defined areas of expertise like ‘school hygiene’. More particularly, I will investigate to what extent everyday practices experienced on the educational shop floor of these institutions can be linked to knowledge ‘globalized’ by ‘international’ conferences on open-air education (and related subjects) from the interwar and post-Second World War period – sites par excellence of cross-border transfer, circulation and diffusion. I will further explore whether knowledge and practices from these conferences and schools reveal changing notions of ‘internationalism’. Methodologically, I will adopt a new-cultural approach, assuming that open-air schools are ‘descended’ from similar initiatives rather than ‘traceable’ to specific ‘origins’, and considering them as changing configurations of inter-national discourses rather than evidence of some countries’ and figureheads’ ‘advance’ in certain areas. Though superseded, such conceptions are still subscribed to by some historians studying the subject from an international perspective. To study how open-air schools and their aspiring ‘movement’ helped ‘internationalize’ health discourses, I will analyse in detail four international open-air school conferences held in France, Belgium, Germany and Italy (1922-1949). Of the last two of these conferences I re-discovered important source material. Since part of this material (minutes, newspaper articles) has already been analyzed with my permission, I will focus on photographs and films – material generally underexplored within educational histories. I expect this analysis to inspire new approaches to processes like internationalization.

The history of children/childhood in Latin America has only begun to draw dedicated scholarly attention in the past decade (Hecht 2002). Prior to and even since then, children’s lives have been typically addressed as subsidiary and secondary to histories of women, legal tutelage, state protectionism, and other domains. This symposium brings together the work of four historians who are carrying out pioneering work on distinct yet overlapping aspects of the history of children/childhood in Latin America. Focusing on elements at the very core of childhood existence –the intertwining of children’s book publishing and political culture, United Nations policymaking around school nutrition, kinship laws in the context of state development, and protagonism on children’s rights and health– we will discuss how the needs and interests of children emerged at the intersection of national, regional, and international agendas in the 20th century.

Three Italian Jewish exiled in Argentina, because of the racial laws, created in 1941 a publishing house: the Editorial Abril. They started publishing a series of small and inexpensive children’s books (like the English and American “Better Little Books”). After the war, Editorial Abril published comics, feminine and teenagers magazines. The Argentinean market was very promising, the economy was booming and consumers were demanding new products in the field of mass culture. But the political situation was not so good: the government of Juan Domingo Perón began to control the education, to censure the press and harassed the foreign entrepreneurs. Fearing that the Peronism could evolve in a fascist-like regime, Editorial Abril invested in Brazil, creating in 1950 a new company, the Editora Abril in São Paulo. In the meantime the publishing house continued its activity in Buenos Aires: invited in Argentina some young Italian writers and designers (as Hugo Pratt) and started to produce a very successful series of comics. At the same time the Editorial Abril published picture stories, a science fiction magazine and a new series of children’s books. The existing old style Argentinean children’s books (published by Editorial Atlantida, Peuser and others publishing houses), with moralistic and edifying stories, on cheap paper and in black and white were rapidly supplanted by the Abril’s books and magazines, full of colours, funny characters, modern stories, beautiful cartoons. The Brazilian company developed along the same lines of production, starting with O Pato Donald. Until the fall of Perón in Argentina the young students read in the school books full of justicialista rhetoric and admiration for the “good fairy” Evita, but at home they could skim trough the pages of El Pato Donald, Misterix, Gatito, Bolsillito, Idilio, Mas allá. The identity of a new generation was formed by the local school system and also by the global mass culture. The anti imperialism of first Peronism didn’t challenge the popularity of the Disney’s heroes: only in the Seventies Donald Duck started to be criticized by the Peronist left as an instrument of cultural colonialism. The paper deals with the changes in the children’s and young subculture in Argentina and Brazil and with the process of socialization of the new generations in the context of the globalization.

In 1998, a controversial reform abolished the discrimination against illegitimate children that had been a fundamental tenet of Chilean civil law since its nineteenth-century codification. The reform, which enhanced rights to material support and inheritance for the 40 to 50 percent of children born each year to unmarried parents, sparked heated debate among different political sectors: right and left, conservative and progressive Catholics, feminists, and human rights reformers. It represented the culmination of a century of legal deliberation among Chilean jurists who had long proven reluctant to expand legal definitions of family and the rights accorded “non-normative” but widespread kinship forms. Reforms similar to the Chilean one had been enacted elsewhere in the hemisphere: in Mexico in the 1920s, in Argentina, Bolivia, and Guatemala in the 1940s, and in Brazil in the 1980s. Indeed, the Chilean reform can be read within a broader hemispheric narrative of legal change, albeit one exhibiting different chronologies in different national contexts. In this narrative, twentieth-century Latin American states have gradually broadened definitions of kinship and accorded increased rights to categories of kin (including extramarital children, adoptive children, and consensual partners) who historically faced discrimination, when not a total lack of legal recognition. This paper explores the Chilean reform within this context. It seeks to plot the evolution of family law in relation to the wider political economy, tracing how legal constructions of kinship have been shaped by three historical developments in twentieth-century Latin America: first, the emergence of a social welfare apparatus in the mid twentieth century; second, the heightened resonance of invocations of “equality before the law” in the context of late twentieth-century democratization; and finally, the increased importance of kin-based networks in the face of contracting social safety nets under contemporary neoliberalism.

School Feeding has a long trajectory in Latin America. Already in the 19th century, “milk drops” (gotas de leche) programs were introduced to lift the nutritional status of disadvantaged children in many countries. With the expansion of the welfare state in the 1920s and most pronouncedly after the rise of developmentalist discourses after World War II, school feeding turned into more than a local, benevolent concern, as it became the subject of discussion and policy at the international level. Unesco, Unicef, the Pan American Health Organization all concerned themselves with the subject, issued guidelines, instituted policies and supervised practices. Who was going to be fed at school? What would they be given? This paper, based on research in multiple archives, examines the rise of school feeding as a field of action for international organizations, discusses the flow of information and inquiries as well as the resulting networks among professionals, but also the conflicts that arose in this matter between the international organizations and their local counterparts.

This paper examines the way in which new ideas about pedagogical reform have spread around the European educational space at the beginning of the twentieth century. Our starting point is the well known experience with community schooling in Hamburg in the period 1919-1933. Was the new Hamburg school an example of a pedagogical innovation that was studied by policy makers and policy influencers from other Northern countries like the Netherlands, and Great Britain? And if so, did these experiences have any lasting impact upon their respective educational systems? We will try to find out by exploring sources like pedagogical journals, newspapers, reports from (international) conferences about education, reports from educational inspectors, and data about study trips. In the Dutch case we will also compare the impact of the new Hamburg schools with the impact of other pedagogical innovations as proposed by Maria Montessori and Helen Parkhurst on the educational system.