Een nieuw platteland bouwen: Het Moderne Dorp op de Wereldtentoonstelling van 1913 in Gent en de Belgische modelschool

In the summer of 2013, the Vlaams Agentschap Onroerend Erfgoed (Flemish Immovable Heritage Agency) investigated a modest little school building in the vicinity of Ghent (Belgium). The old building proved to be a reconstruction of the model school in the Modern Village, a Belgian government pavilion of great social significance at the 1913 World’s Fair in Ghent. The model school is the only surviving building from the Modern Village.Since this discovery, further investigations by the heritage agency have revealed the dearth of scholarly studies of either the Modern Village or the model school building. The great social importance of this Belgian rural model school is, however, becoming increasingly clear. This article is a critical assessment of that importance. A brief outline of the historical context in which the Modern Village and the model school came about is followed by a description of their social significance and the impact on Belgian and European society. The starting point is an analysis of the evaluation reports of the Modern Village published in book form by the then director general of the Ministry of Agriculture, Paul De Vuyst, and a member of parliament, Emile Tibbaut. The authenticity of the reconstruction of the model school is assessed based on recent construction history research. Finally, the question of the extent to which the model school design was adopted was explored during a field trip with the help of local cultural and archival agencies. The 1913 World’s Fair in Ghent took place in a period of mass rural migration that resulted in poverty and social unrest in many parts of Europe. The Belgian government was keen to do something about this by building a new countryside with a better quality of life. To that end they exhibited the Modern Village – a practical and instructive embodiment of their policy – at the Ghent World’s Fair. The ambition was to modernize the rural economy and beautify the villages. Via the introduction of compulsory education for children between the ages of six and fourteen, future generations would be taught the skills and techniques needed to modernize the economy and simultaneously achieve the edification of the rural population, central to which was a love of one’s own region and traditions. The effects of the Modern Village on the modernization of agriculture and on the improvement of the quality of life were felt mainly after the First World War, not just in Belgium but in other countries, too, such as Hungary. The model school in the Modern Village was conceived as an affordable and easy-to-build school building that would facilitate the realization of this new rural culture. The construction survey has demonstrated the authenticity based on the specific roof shapes in stone dating from over a hundred years ago. Recent field research complements the latest investigations by the Flemish Government and strengthens the hypothesis that the model school was widely emulated and played an important role in the implementation of compulsory schooling in Belgium. Further research is necessary, not least to obtain clarity about the adoption of the new teaching methods presented in the model school and the significance of small primary school libraries for the general edification of the rural population