The Home Chez Nous as a Model for Child Care

Authors

  • Joseph Coquoz Haute école spécialisée de Suisse occidentale, Lausanne

Keywords:

Active school, Adolphe Ferrière, International League for New Education, children’s home, film on education.

Abstract

Created in 1919, the Home Chez Nous began as a small institution in the Swiss canton of Vaud that provided care for young children who had been removed from their family homes by the canton’s child protection agency. It was directed by three women who chose to devote themselves entirely to this educational mission and whose work was greatly influenced by the Progressive Education movement, thanks to their own education at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva. The involvement of Adolphe Ferrière in the Home Chez Nous as of 1929 contributed to the international renown of the institution, as Ferrière would present it as a model of an «Active School» through his countless writings and the distribution of a film on the Home Chez Nous itself. Such promotion was nevertheless based on fiction insofar as there was a considerable difference between the reality of this institution and Ferrière’s writings on the subject. This begs the question as to the modes of production of educational models. Could they be anything other than a rhetorical construction to the service of a cause?

KEY WORDS: Active school, Adolphe Ferrière, International League for New Education, children’s home, film on education.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Downloads

Issue

No. 20 (2012): juliol-desembre

Section

Monographic theme

License

The intellectual property of articles belongs to the respective authors.

On submitting articles for publication to the journal Educació i Història: Revista d'Història de l'Educació, authors accept the following terms:

  1. Authors assign to Society for the History of Education in Catalan-speaking countries (a subsidiary of Institut d’Estudis Catalans) the rights of reproduction, communication to the public and distribution of the articles submitted for publication to Educació i Història: Revista d'Història de l'Educació.
  2. Authors answer to Society for the History of Education in Catalan-speaking countries for the authorship and originality of submitted articles.
  3. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission for the reproduction of all graphic material included in articles.
  4. The Society for the History of Education in Catalan-speaking countries declines all liability for the possible infringement of intellectual property rights by authors.
  5. The contents published in the journal, unless otherwise stated in the text or in the graphic material, are subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (by-nc-nd) 3.0 Spain licence, the complete text of which may be found at  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/deed.en. Consequently, the general public is authorised to reproduce, distribute and communicate the work, provided that its authorship and the body publishing it are acknowledged, and that no commercial use and no derivative works are made of it.
  6. The journal is not responsible for the ideas and opinions expressed by the authors of the published articles.