L’Ecole des Roches, phare français au sein de la nébuleuse de l’Education nouvelle (1899–1944)

Abstract

L’Ecole des Roches is the prototype of the New School in France. It opened its doors in October 1899 with 50 boys who were put up in a house within a large park of 24 ha. It still exists: a coeducational school since 1969, it now has nearly 360 students divided into eight houses spread over a large park of 60 ha including sports grounds, tennis courts, a swimming pool, a stadium, a gymnasium and a community centre. It is located in the middle of the countryside in Normandy, near the small town of Verneuil‐sur‐Avre in the Eure départment. Since 1990, it has been an international boarding school plus a language school, but it has broken with the New Education movement, this partition dating back to the end of the Second World War. Nevertheless l’Ecole des Roches remains a vivid place of memory of the New Education Movement thanks to Georges Bertier, the headmaster in charge from 1903 to 1944. How could l’Ecole des Roches appear as a French beacon among the nebulous international new schools, especially in the period between the two world wars? First because the links between l’Ecole des Roches and Geneva are numerous, thanks to the educationist Adolphe Ferrière as well as his assistant Elisabeth Huguenin. Then because Georges Bertier was not only the bright headmaster of a well‐known school but was also the instigator of new methods of education in France and abroad thanks to his keen action within the international movement for the New Education. Under his rule l’Ecole des Roches became a French new school halfway through innovative advances in a new style of education and the concurrent demands for a traditional culture and the learning of classical subjects. He had his ideas spread through the magazine l’Education founded in 1909 and the scout movement, named Les Eclaireurs de France, over which he presided from 1921 to 1937. Being appointed a member of the Conseil Supérieur de l’Instruction Publique in the early 1930s his action had a very real and lasting influence in the creation of new classes in 1945 by the top Director of Secondary Schools, Gustave Monod, who knew very well l’Ecole des Roches having himself been a former head of house in the 1910s. In 1921 Bertier became a distinguished member of the French group for a New Education (GFEN), a French branch of Le LIEN, alongside university men such as Paul Langevin, Henri Wallon and Henri Pieron. Thus Bertier was at the heart of the renovation led by the GFEN. Most of his lectures were based on setting the example of l’Ecole des Roches as a model easy to implement in state secondary sclools.