FIRST STEPS

The early stages of the progressive education movement can be traced in the USA and many parts of Europe, and the characteristics of the “new education ” are fully described in the chapters of the book “The Internationality of Progressive Education”: study of the child, creation of experimental schools, acceptance of the role of education in restructuring society. In all cases, progressive educators were reacting against the traditional intellectualized forms of schooling around them, and they reached out, searched for contacts with like-minded colleagues abroad. Indeed, this effort to make and maintain linkages gave the movement an international quality which was to become more visible in the early years of the 20th century. Geneva played an important part in many of the steps in this direction. In 1899 the educator Adolphe Ferrière who travelled a great deal around Europe and promoted the idea of educational renewal by what he termed the “active school”, established in Geneva an International Bureau of New Schools. When in 1909 the Belgian Edouard Peeters set up in Ostende the Bureau International de Documentation Educative (BIDE), his monthly journal “Minerva ” served also as the organ for Ferrière’s group. Then in 1912 came the creation in Geneva of the Institut Jean-Jacques Rousseau which crowned the efforts of Claparède to obtain university recognition for child psychology and experimental pedagogy. The Institut was designed to prepare teachers, carry out research and provide information not only to serving teachers but also to the general public – a typica