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According to the Vichy Regime, beginning in July 1940, the whole school system, from preschool to university, had a great responsibility in the decline of patriotism justifying the rapid defeat in the face of the German armed forces. As Marshal Petain pointed out in his 20 June 1940 speech: "Since the Victory, a spirit of pleasure prevailed over the spirit of sacrifice. People claimed more than they served. Efforts were saved, and people nowadays have been living in despair." The national Revolution the Regime brought about had to help revive the true values of the Nation, founding its activities on Work, Family and Homeland. Therefore, the "undesirables" (Jews, Freemasons, Communists, ...) had to be rejected from the school system and the dissemination of national values had to prevail. As Serge Jeanneret, one of the Marshal's trustees, noted: "Making the Revolution without Schools is as useful as a sand building" (extracted from Serge Jeanneret, La vérité sur les instituteurs [The Truth about Teachers], Paris, Flammarion, 1941, p. 173). From that point of view, all the educational ministers belonging to the Vichy Regime tried to reform the school system – its organisation, its programmes and staff – in order to train a "newman", even if they sometimes fed projects launched during the interwar period. The Communist teachers and the Freemasons were expelled from schools because the 13 August 1940 Law prohibited them from working in the civil service. Registration as not belonging to secret societies was required of the educational staff. The first Jewish status (3 October 1940), then the second (2 June 1941), excluded Jews from the school system. The Act proclaimed on 21 June 1941 introduced a numerus clausus for the Jews (3%) in universities. The 8 September 1940 Act closed teacher training schools for primary staff, which were replaced by a new training organisation. The competitive examination laureates were integrated into secondary schools, passed the baccalaureate and, for one year, they attended a vocational training institute and had to undergo four different practical trainings. They had a three-month period at the vocational institute, a three-month training period in primary schools, a three-month training period in an agricultural education school or a technical school and, for women, a three-month training period in a housecraft centre, and one month's training in a regional sport centre. The Vichy Regime and the Germans also forbade certain schoolbooks. Consequently, they modified the programmes to assert the stronger continuity of French History with Ancient times. This enabled a reduction of the revolutionary and Republican impact and promoted French geography and homeland. Pupils were invited to love their local and national fatherland. That sense of belonging could induce them to remain attached to their home. The veneration of the leader, the morals for duty and sacrifice, the symbol of eternal femininity serving the family were reasserted in the educational culture. At the same time, the Vichy Regime struggled with secularism and supported private schools, giving numerous grants to Catholic schools thanks to the Law of 2 November 1941. The Minister Jacques Chevalier, with the 6 December 1940 Act, restored duties to God in civic and moral instruction programmes for primary schools (those duties had been suppressed in 1923). The Ripert Act on 15 October 1940 allowed the local education city office to award grants to poor pupils who attended private schools. The Jacques Chevalier Act on 6 January 1941 allowed cities to finance equipment charges and operational costs concerning the private schools (and especially lighting, heating and lunchrooms). The 6 January 1941 Law, by welcoming God in schools and asserting that religious instruction could exceptionally be delivered by a priest in educational buildings, modified one fundamental pillar of the French Republican School. With the 10 March 1941 Law, Jérôme Carcopino, faced with such a great number of opponents, demanded that religious instruction became optional and was studied off school premises. he Vichy Regime also reformed school organisation. Jérôme Carcopino launched the main transformations with the 15 August 1941 Act. Higher Primary Schools became modern secondary schools and were linked to secondary education in the hope of weakening them. At the same time, the selection process was reinforced. Primary schooling was divided into two cycles. The first included a preparatory class (for children aged 6–7 years), an elementary class (7–9-year-olds) and a middle class (from 9- to 11-year-olds). At the end of the first cycle, a diploma for preparatory primary studies was created and prescribed as compulsory if pupils intended to go further in public schooling (i.e. additional classes, primary or secondary high schools); but pupils who succeeded in the scholarship examination were exempted from the diploma. The second cycle (three years from age 11 to age 14) ended with the Primary Certificate. In secondary education, Jérôme Carcopino increased selection and, according to the 15 August 1941 Decree, the principle of free access was suppressed for pupils older than 14 years of age. This multidimensional reform had to face two major obstacles that considerably reduced its implementation. First, the war years were not favourable to educational change – the country was partly and afterwards totally occupied after November 1942. German troops occupied a majority of schools. Shortages were numerous and many teachers were imprisoned in Germany. Labour requisitioning progressively affected the older pupils, mainly student and fresh teachers. The Vichy Regime, after the succession principle failed – the principle was established on 22 June 1942 and proposed that one prisoner came back to France and was traded for three skilled workers sent to Germany – decided, according to the 4 September 1942 Law, to organise forced conscription for male workers (from 18 to 50 years old) and for unmarried women (from 21 to 35 years old). The constraint was then accentuated with the 16 February 1943 Law implementing Mandatory Work Service – Service du Travail Obligatoire STO – for young adults (aged 20–21 and 22-year-old men). All these young men had to be registered and the process made people-requisitioning easier. Therefore, they could definitely be sent to Germany. Second, there was a sort of revolt by the educational staff, who were deeply attached to the Republican values and the Jules Ferry conception of school. Indeed, they strove to reduce the scope of the legislation, rejecting the political choices of the Vichy Regime and also collaboration. If teachers, students and older pupils joined the collaborator parties, most of them remained prudent and followed as little as possible the Vichy Regime's instructions. They commemorated forbidden celebrations and listened to BBC radio. A minority joined the Resistance fighters and got involved in the dissemination of tracts and of clandestine papers. They also committed to information networks, escape organisations or fights against the occupiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Worldwide, subject-matter teachers are commonplace in post-elementary schools. Teachers' specialisation appears as a key characteristic of secondary schools as opposed to the polyvalence of primary school teachers. Historians have already studied the long process of teachers' specialisation, which started, in France as in Prussia (for example), at the beginning of the nineteenth century and developed alongside secondary school modernisation. Those works have usually focused on professional aspects: the structuration of professional groups thanks to the unification of training and recruiting processes, the organisation of teachers within subject-matter associations etc. However, they have not paid much attention to the resistance opposed by other forms of pedagogical organisation, as if polyvalence were were just a backward anomaly, a backward anomaly, doomed to disappear. This paper seeks to shed new light on this question using a comparison between the different forms of post-elementary schooling that existed at the same time in France between the last third of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth, when the slow growth of post-elementary schooling was mainly due to the success of subaltern institutions. In those institutions, dedicated to technical education, girls' secondary education, or upper-lower classes' education ("primaire supérieur", "secondaire special"), different kinds of polyvalence or bivalence were experienced in the classrooms. At the same time, specialisation was triumphing in classical secondary education. Why, how and to what extent did specialisation eventually impose itself in these different institutions? To address this question, two types of material are used. On the one hand, the question is studied on a national level, analysing both the legislation and the controversies it arouses in pedagogical and professional reviews. On the other hand, these views and theories are confronted with a prosopography of post-elementary school teachers in one department, Eure-et-Loir, which offers several forms of post-elementary institutions. This question is addressed focusing on literary disciplines (philosophy, French, Latin, Greek, modern languages and history and geography). By narrowing the scope, the intellectual and cultural stakes of the various pedagogical organisations that were implemented or advocated may more easily be grasped. The first part of the article examines the most common (though relatively untested) hypothesis: there was just one strategy for those who advocated the promotion of subaltern types of post-elementary schooling as part of a democratisation process, and this strategy was reproducing the model of the elite institution, secondary classical education, including its pedagogical organisation, starting with subject-matter teachers. The chronology of the changes, the content of the debates, as well as a comparative inquiry into teachers' remuneration induces us to discard this hypothesis as insufficient if not irrelevant. For girls' secondary education, a trade-off may be observed between equalisation (of salaries, rights etc.) and pedagogical alignment. For the other institutions, there was no lack of advocates for the specificity of the pedagogy or of the institution; however, specialisation was usually considered a process that could ameliorate the quality of teaching in these institutions without renouncing its specificity. In fact, in the period under study, the louder advocates for less specialised teachers came from secondary classical education itself: the specialisation process as well as the fragmentation of the class schedule had pedagogic inconveniences, abundantly noticed and commented on by subject-matter teachers themselves. In the second part, these critics and the two main alternatives suggested by the teachers are examined. The first is linked with the Progressive Education movement ("Education nouvelle" in French). The École des Roches, a private institution, tested an original organisation that combined the tradition of the humanities with the modern characteristic of "Éducation nouvelle": there was only one teacher for history, geography, French, Latin and Greek. The teacher was thus enabled to practise a pedagogy of interest, as advocated by Ovide Decroly. The second alternative was advocated by some modern language teachers: if modern language teachers could teach French as well as a modern language, this pedagogic organisation could give strong unity to the until then defective "modern" curriculum (without Latin). The third part turns towards the effective organisation of post-elementary schools in Eure-et-Loir. To what extent were these alternative conceptions of pedagogical organisation implemented? The analysis of individual records of teachers suggests several results. First of all, in small institutions – be they classical secondary institutions like "collèges" or modern ones like "écoles primaires supérieures" – specialisation of services was a luxury that most teachers could not afford. Most of the time, they had to teach several subjects, even if they had been trained for just one. However, polyvalence was not used as an opportunity to make connections between the subjects. Class schedules rarely enabled teachers to use polyvalence as a way to teach several subjects to the same pupils. More often, polyvalence was used by the administration as an expedient that some teachers explicitly tried to escape, for example by asking for a move to a bigger institution. This mundane reality of small institutions invites us to pay renewed attention to teacher training and its regulation during the same period. At the end of the nineteenth century, teachers' specialisation had been inextricably linked with the modernisation of universities through the specialisation of the "licence de lettres" in 1880. When this model proved to be partially irrelevant for a significant proportion of post-elementary schools, how did universities react? Were universities fit for something other than training specialised teachers? The answer is yes. The curriculum organisation of the licence opened up several possibilities for training polyvalent teachers. This perspective was still looming at the end of the 1930s. The curricula of the different post-elementary settings analysed in this article shared the same characteristics: they worked as "serial codes" not as "integrated codes", to quote Basil Bernstein. Therefore the specialisation, bivalence or polyvalence of the teachers did not have much influence, in itself, on the degree of integration of the curriculum. From this perspective, specialisation could probably guarantee better teaching of the subject matters. However, polyvalent teachers were better suited to small schools than specialist ones. Considering demographic and geographic constraints, there was a clear trade-off between specialisation of teachers and separation of publics. In small cities, it was necessary either to mix the pupils to specialise the teachers, or to accept some kind of polyvalence to keep different types of students separated; the debate was still open during the 1930s. School massification, coeducation and the baby-boom era rapidly settled the matter for small cities after the Second World War, giving way to an effective specialisation of teachers. But the question remained open, until the end of the 1970s, for rural settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The circulation of knowledge and educational innovations at the beginning of the twentieth century followed the growth of public educational systems. It led to complex exchanges and configurations due to the crossing of different national traditions, ideas and practices. The organisation of homogeneous classrooms according to the mental development of students and of special classes for children with learning difficulties and personality troubles are examples of this process. In the elementary schools of Belo Horizonte, Brazil, special classes for the "mentally retarded" were part of a reform of the public educational system promoted by the local government in 1927. The reform was implemented during the 1930s under the supervision of the Belo Horizonte Teachers Training College, where foreign specialists were hired to head the Laboratory of Psychology and to help in the organisation of homogeneous classrooms. The Laboratory of Psychology was established in 1928 by the French psychiatrist Théodore Simon (1873–1961), who had been invited for the task, and its directorship was assumed subsequently by two Russian psychologists who had worked as assistants to Claparède at the Rousseau Institute in Geneva (Léon Walther [1889–1963], in the first semester of 1929, and Helena Antipoff [1892–1974] from 1929 till 1944). The purpose of this paper is to study the project of special classes that were established at the time, using as sources articles published by Antipoff and her students in the periodical Infância Excepcional (Exceptional Children), edited in Belo Horizonte during the 1930s and 1940s, the correspondence Antipoff maintained with her master Édouard Claparède (1873–1940), the Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist, and a founder of the Rousseau Institute of the Sciences of Education in Geneva, and other documents concerning the works of the Belo Horizonte Teachers Training College. This article looks at how these special classes, based on the guidelines proposed by Helena Antipoff, were established, adapted and transformed within the Brazilian context. Born in Russia, Helena Antipoff studied in France (1910–1911), where she was an intern at the Binet-Simon laboratory of psychology, and Geneva (1912–1914), where she completed her studies in the sciences of education at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, where she subsequently worked as teaching assistant and researcher (1926–1929). The authors' hypothesis is that the special classes established in Belo Horizonte were designed on the basis of the European, especially the Genevan model; that they represented an example of the international flow and dissemination of knowledge, and of the building of a benchmark in the field of special education in Brazil; that they subsequently contributed to the social construction of professions related to the field of special education and of the circulation and modelling of what came to be labelled as "learning and personality troubles" in children. Special classes for the education of "retarded" children and of children with learning difficulties were established in Geneva in the beginning of the twentieth century, where Claparède had supervised the examination and selection of students and the training of schoolteachers for special education since 1901. With the foundation of the Rousseau Institute in 1912, the training of teachers and the development of methods for the examination and education of special children were assumed by the Institute's team, including Claparède, the medical doctor François Naville and Alice Descoeudres, who was responsible for the development of several methods for special education. In Belo Horizonte, the establishment of special classes for the education of "retarded" children was part of a school reform launched in 1927, inspired by New Education ideals. Under Antipoff's leadership, the Laboratory of Psychology promoted the organisation of homogeneous classrooms and of special education classes in local elementary schools, starting in 1930. Intelligence tests were adapted for the measurement of the mental development of students. In the interpretation of the results, Antipoff emphasised the role of the social environment in shaping students' cognitive abilities, and developed the concept of "civilised intelligence" to explain differences in students' performances with regard to the social level of their families. "Civilised intelligence" referred to intellectual abilities already polished by society and culture, present in mental test results. She discussed with Claparède the possibility of including a "social factor" in the interpretation of test results. In the organisation and supervision of educational activities in the special classes of Belo Horizonte, the laboratory of Psychology team adapted mental orthopaedic exercises developed in Paris by Alfred Binet and in Geneva by Alice Descoeudres. Books written by Claparède and Descoeudres were translated into Portuguese, and educational practices recommended for special classes based on their suggestions were spread among teachers who came from other Brazilian states and even from other Latin American countries to attend the Belo Horizonte Teachers College. In 1932, under Antipoff's leadership, a group of teachers, doctors and intellectuals established the Belo Horizonte Pestalozzi Society for the purpose of better developing the examination and the education of mentally "retarded" and troubled children, and of giving support for the work done in special classes in Belo Horizonte schools. The approach to special education developed at the Laboratory of Psychology and at the Pestalozzi Society became known in Brazil for its "Active school" perspective, inspired by the Genevan experience. Reports written by Antipoff's students such as Naytres Rezende show that most students who attended special classes presented normal levels of intelligence, but were psychologically disturbed. The majority of those students came from low-income families. Mental orthopaedic exercises were then adapted for the development of the "civilised intelligence" required by schools. Concerning the development of special education in Belo Horizonte, one can see that the division of classes by intellectual level, the use of intelligence tests for diagnosis, the reference to the idea of a "student tailored school" proposed by Claparède, and the dialogue with methods suggested by Alice Descoeudres provide evidence of its close relationship with the Genevan model. The ideal of a scientific pedagogy, as proposed by Claparède, was remarkable in the Belo Horizonte experience, under the leadership of the Teachers College Laboratory of Psychology. At the same time, the interpretation of mental test results as manifestations of a type of "civilised intelligence" and the adaptations of mental orthopaedic exercises in order to develop this kind of intelligence required by schools show the transformations of the model within the Brazilian context. Although the model proposed for Belo Horizonte special classes can be interpreted as deriving from the Genevan approach, more research is needed to better describe how these ideas were put into practice within the highly complex institutional context of existing schools. It is important to observe what the consequences were of the organisation of special classes for children with learning or personality troubles for the future development of the local school system and for the targeted population, i.e. children with difficulties of adaptation to a highly centralised and hierarchical school system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nurse already appears in the Odyssey as a key character in Greek family life, showing all the characteristics that will remain hers throughout Greek Antiquity: she is a slave and has been working in her master's house before the child's birth; she has been chosen specially for the task of nursing and rearing the newborn, as she attends the delivery and is the first one to take the baby in her arms; later on, she takes care of the general education of the child and follows her 'protege' in his/her adult life; sometimes, she carries out the same tasks for her protege's children. While recent research has often focused on her servile status, basing its arguments mostly on literature, this paper is based on iconography. The Greek nurse has the peculiarity of being very often represented as an old woman, even in the company of small children. The analysis of the context of representations of the trophos and of their chronological evolution allows us to reach a conclusion about this peculiar feature that goes beyond a realistic interpretation or a simple 'caricature'. The old age shown by the Greek trophos, and the Greek paidagogos also, is a means to express the ideal of personal renunciation that is expected of them: it seems that the Greek trophos was not so much attached to her functions of nursing and educating as to the child itself, acting as a kind of protective daimon for it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various factors oblige today's parents to entrust their children to a child-care worker (CCW), providing services in the domestic sphere, either at the child's parental house or at the day-care worker's (DCW's) own home. Taking this into account, this paper examines job offers and applications for DCWs published in a regional Swiss newspaper as well as other job offers and applications published on a website called bestnounou.ch. The parents often tend to use a variety of terms, which do not point to the child-caring or rearing activity itself, but rather emphasise sociological characteristics of the CCW (age, gender, civil status), requesting, for example, a 'lady', a 'grandmother', a 'student'. Thereby, the parents present the child-care work as: (1) a secondary and temporary activity in relation to another major stable activity (motherhood, apprenticeship, retirement); and (2) an activity that does not require professional skills but inborn aptitudes. Moreover, employers use as synonyms distinctive terms, which refer to various categories of CCW and domestic workers, whose schedules of conditions and salaries are regulated and differ. The parents' inclination to use terms designating the most precarious and underpaid CCW underscores the importance of child-care in the domestic sphere. It leads also to a public image of child-care workers as being a fragmented, unstable, little qualified and economically inconsistent workforce, in contrast to the stable and structural need for their specific services, allowing parents to face their familial and professional responsibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In ancient Greece, the representation of the divine and heroic world is characterised by a very sophisticated anthropomorphism. However, the supra-human world is more than the lifelike projection of a human society into a higher sphere. In the discrepancies between socio-history and representation, some aspects of a divine specificity can be discerned. Accordingly, the respective roles of mother and wet nurse are not human types transported as such in the society of Greek gods. These types of human experience are 'translated' at a higher level to suggest some aspects of the relationship that men want to establish with their gods. In return - and taking into account the discrepancies mentioned above - the narrative plots that feature such roles among the gods and heroes can reflect on their human counterparts and some current practices within Greek society. This paper addresses the role of the wet nurse respectively endorsed by the goddess Demeter taking care of a human baby and by the goddess Hera suckling the hero Heracles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present paper the author proposes a mytho-symbolic analysis of some of the main texts of Maria Montessori (1870–1952) in which the theme of the New Child was the object of particular attention. Study of these texts enables the author to demonstrate that Montessori insisted on the redemptive character of the new child. The child serves as the guide to the adult in forming a society of new men. He constitutes the guidance for the construction of a new more harmonious, pacific future. This study is based on a pedagogic-cultural approach by the use of a mythanalytic hermeneutics and the elaboration of an ideologemic decor that shows the vectors of the texts analysed as well as the mythical contours of those ideas. The result of the mythanalytic reading, carried out with the most rigorous hermeneutic criteria, concludes that Montessori is under a strong influence of Christian mythologemes such as that of the Saviour Child or its related myths of Hermes and Prometheus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]