Globalisation des Mondes de l'Éducation: Circulations, Connexions, Réfractions, XIXe–XXe Siècles eds. by Joëlle Droux and Rita Hofstetter (review)

How to combine the existence of a global grammar of schooling that has been shaped by continuous mutual adaptations with the fact that education systems were key components of nation-building processes and the histories of education are mostly told in national terms? This question, explicitly asked by one of the contributors can be regarded as the rationale for the entire volume. The book introduces state-of-the-art research by a team of historians of education, most of whom have been affiliated with the University of Geneva. It makes a valuable contribution to the history of education and the broader field of global history. The covered time frame extends from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, although a majority of contributions discuss the interwar period.

A first set of chapters deals with internationalization efforts in the interwar period. Frédéric Mole focuses on the transnational activities of teachers' unions. He introduces the French teacher and activist Georges Lapierre who played a leading role in national and international organizations, promoting progressive educational ideas and pacifism. Béatrice Haenggeli-Jenni discusses the female authors of Pour l'ère nouvelle, the Francophone journal of the New Education Fellowship which appeared since 1921. Haenggeli-Jenni distinguishes between female experts of early childhood, instructors in secondary education and elite women who belonged to the international committee of the Fellowship. From a fresh sociological perspective, she shows how the contributions to the journal helped the women to foster their professional and intellectual agendas.

The following four chapters deal with questions around the League of Nations and the United Nations. Although of high standard and intelligently combining perspectives of history, sociology, and international relations, non-specialist readers might easily get confused with the numerous international organizations, committees, and institutions that are often only mentioned by their abbreviations. Zoe Moody focuses on three declarations on childhood protection passed in 1924, 1959, and 1989. She traces how, over the decades, negotiations of international governmental and non-governmental organizations transformed the idealist common cause of the protection of childhood into a prescriptive norm. Joëlle Droux' chapter highlights the role of the League of Nations' Children's Protection Committee created in 1925 in this process. The committee tried to promote best practice in a policy field that had been thought of in exclusively national terms before. The committee suffered from limited resources and the reluctance of big powers to invest it with real competences. Rita Hofstetter presents the International Bureau of Education, founded in Geneva in 1925 with the ambition of being the key platform of internationalist educators. Leonora Dugonjić uncovers the beginnings of the United Nations International School in New York in the late 1940s. She argues that the school did not respond to a genuine demand by international civil servants who as parents searched for a way to educate their children. Instead, its foundation goes back to a small group of ambitious bureaucrats who rather needed the parents in order to put their project of an international school into practice.

Damiano Matasci and Alexandre Fontaine present aspects of their recently published dissertation projects and put the educational reforms of the French Third Republic in a transnational context.¹ Matasci shows how Republican reformers consciously constructed the idea of a French "delay" in terms of primary education. This supposed "delay" served the reformers to push the implementation of new laws. It also served them to legitimize the transfer of foreign models into the French context under the banner of a supposed international "harmonisation." In contrast, Fontaine demonstrates how a partially real and partially fabricated French "backwardness" was also a reason for shame for these same reformers. In this sense, Fontaine traces how reference to more neutral French-speaking Switzerland could be a way for French reformers to avoid a more...