Joëlle Droux

Going international: the history of education stepping beyond borders

Over the past two decades, historians have gradually tended to focus their attention on phenomena such as transfer, movement, dissemination, flows and exchanges between different spaces. Such is also the case with the history of education, an academic field that proved to be particularly sensitive to such circulatory processes. As a telling example of this growing interest, an international conference on internationalisation in education was held in Geneva, in June 2012, under the patronage of three societies: the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE34), the Society for the History of Children and Youth and the Disability History Association. They came together for the first time in order to achieve an impressive worldwide gathering of about 500 participants dealing with global and transnational issues. The increase in studies, conferences and publications – including keynote books or published series – dedicated to the history of the mechanisms of internationalisation is undoubtedly due to the perceived pervasiveness, over the past decades, of phenomena linked to globalisation. Whether a matter of concern or an opportunity to rejoice in the creation of a global village, globalisation has inspired and prompted the renewal of research and input in the social sciences. As for historians, who are certainly more accustomed than their colleagues in the humanities to limiting their plot to national territories and contexts, they took their time before getting excited about internationalisation. Since the 1990s, however, they have definitely caught up, and their enthusiasm has hitherto resulted in an increase in approaches, perspectives and conceptions about processes that go beyond national boundaries. Whether labelled histoire croisée, connected or entangled history, world-global-transnational

Between Great Expectations and Hard Times: The First Decade of the Geneva Children’s Penal Court, 1914–1925

This chapter looks at the Geneva (Switzerland) juvenile court in its first decade (1914–1925). The 1913 Act that established this court arose from ambiguous, apparently contradictory, ambitions: removing minors from the ambit of the criminal law, re-educating them, and repressing delinquency. The practice of the court shows—among other things—that the concern for re-education and other pragmatic factors were present in daily decisions. The introduction of ‘persistent misconduct’ as a basis for intervention that aimed to prevent future delinquency led to the imposition of important measures that can be viewed both from a welfare and from a repressive standpoint. The proactive role of some parents suggests that families were not mere subjects of repression but could take an active part in procedures.

Introduction: A Global History Written from the ILO

More than a history of the ILO, this book aims to map out a global history written from the perspective of the ILO, following the trend towards the ‘globalization’ of both the themes and practices1 of history as a discipline, for which the international organizations — and the ILO in particular — are especially fertile fields of study.