The contradictions of the universalist ambitions of the International Bureau of Education

• In Event: Building Peace through International Cooperation in Education: The UNESCO IBE's Legacy in Global Governance (Centenary Panel)

Proposal

Based on our monograph on the IBE (Hofstetter & Schneuwly, 2024), this contribution describes the contradictions inherent in the universalist ambitions of the International Bureau of Education (IBE) from its foundation in 1925 to the end of Jean Piaget's directorship of the institution.

We could even recognize the conditions conducive to the construction of a lateral universal, a “multiversum,” to borrow Bloch's concept (1956/1970). This implies the translation of “voices,” as proposed by Diagne in his book De langue à langue (2022), which Piaget conceptualized in a certain way in his theory of moral judgment as a way of overcoming egocentrism: “To step outside oneself, one must understand others, and to understand others, one must cooperate with them, intellectually and morally, on a basis of complete reciprocity.” (1930, p. 227)

Universal in scope from the outset, the IBE immediately came up against similar ambitions on the part of other organizations. Having become intergovernmental, it based its determination to define universal ambitions in education on the international conferences on public education, which brought together representatives from all over the world to discuss the global progress of education and crucial problems facing public systems. Our contribution shows, however, that the universal aimed for by the IBE can also be read as the pre-eminence of a model, that of the West (Chakrabarty, 2009); the latter then remains the vector of a civilizing tendency, the emblem of a vertical universalism (Merleau-Ponty, 1960), since the conditions for achieving the recommendations are not included in the recommendations drawn up within it.

Nevertheless, the BIE has provided a fascinating laboratory for closely observing international dialogue processes that differ in some respects from others, and this in the area that is most coveted and protected by nation states: education. From this perspective, it stands in stark contrast to the dominant modes of international governance today.


References

Bloch, E. (1956/1970). Differenzierungen im Begriff Fortschritt. Arche Verlag.

Chakrabarty, D. (2009). Provincializing Europe. Princeton University Press.

Diagne, S. B. (2022). De langue à langue : l’hospitalité de la traduction. Albin Michel.

Hofstetter, R. & Schneuwly, B. (2024). The International Bureau of Education (1925-1968): the Ascension “from the Individual to the Universal.” Palgrave Macmillan (Global Histories of Education). https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-41308-7

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1960). De Mauss à Claude Lévi-Strauss. In: Signes (pp. 143-157). Gallimard.

Piaget, J. (1930). La vie sociale de l’enfant. L’école libératrice, 2 (9), 226-227.

Author

• Bernard Schneuwly, University of Geneva