Des réfugiés pour éduquer les enfants réfugiés d'Europe? Trajectoires de participants étrangers au Cours international de moniteurs pour homes d'enfants victimes de la guerre Genève 1944-1945

• Published in: Paedagogica historica Vol. 59; no. 5; pp. 818 - 836
• Main Author: Boussion, Samuel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 03.09.2023; Taylor & Francis Ltd; Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
• Subjects: children's homes; Concentration camps; Educational Experience; formation; homes d'enfants; Humanities and Social Sciences; international; International Education; Moniteurs; Monitors; refugees; Resistance (Psychology); réfugiés; War; Switzerland; Europe
• ISSN: 0030-9230; 1477-674X
• DOI: 10.1080/00309230.2021.1952279

At the heart of refuge in Switzerland during the Second World War, a singular training experience was set up in Geneva in order to train a complete educational staff in charge of children placed in homes in that country but also in the rest of Europe. In November 1944, an "International Course for Monitors of Homes for Child Victims of War" was inaugurated, in which the pupils would follow a six-month session of teaching, mainly in pedagogy and psychology, as well as practical exercises in real-life situations. Half of the students on the course came from Swiss internment camps and the other half were Swiss nationals, with the same proportion during the second session, which began in the spring of 1945. This article traces the history of the beginnings of the Monitors' Course through the careers of the pupils of the first two classes, mainly through the individual records kept in the Federal Archives in Bern of monitors who had been in Switzerland since 1942. The idea for this course was first conceived in Geneva's educational circles from the Institute of Educational Sciences (formerly the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute) accompanied by several educators who had found refuge in Switzerland. The result is a model of future international education, including the profile of these future actors in reconstruction. The project resulted in the use of all available manpower through students who would come from the country's internment camps. Freed for a time from their internment status, these young women and men all came out of the mass refuge, having fled persecution because they were Jews, and arrived in Switzerland between the summer of 1942 and the spring of 1944. Far from being merely an opportunity to escape from the logic of confinement and the constraint of placements, sometimes experienced even before the war, entry into the course was for many the result of joining networks and collectives that were gradually being formed, particularly within the humanitarian organisations which looked after these refugees. The files also make it possible to evaluate the place of the Monitors' Course in the individual trajectories of the students. Although few had previously had educational experience with children, except for having themselves been children rescued from homes, some of them continued in this way after leaving the course, exporting their skills acquired in their country or their country of emigration, thus contributing to the significant movement in the field of education in the post-war period. Conversely, the Geneva Course was for all of them a "transitional space", between their past of exile and their future.