‘Merci à tous et à toutes de votre propagande, si pleine de charme et de sourires’: on tour with the Socialist travelling colony Gentse Volkskinderen (1898–1915)

Abstract

At the end of the nineteenth century Aimé Bogaerts, a Socialist primary school teacher at a Ghent municipal school and from 1901 on the chief editor of the Socialist newspaper ‘Vooruit’, began a new educational initiative: ‘the children of the popular classes from Ghent’ (‘De Gentsche Volkskinderen’). Children from the working class were invited to sing, to dance, to recite, to do gymnastics and to play theatre. At the same time, short and longer holiday trips to France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, England and Germany were organised. In this paper, based on written primary sources and visual sources, Bogaerts’s ‘Gentsche Volkskinderen’ will be analysed from a double ‘child at risk’ perspective. First, there is the child at risk on a political‐ideological level. With his initiative Bogaerts wanted to convince working‐class parents to withdraw their children from the activities organised by the Liberal workers’ societies as he strongly disagreed with the central Liberal idea of ‘moralising the workers by enlightening them’. Second, there is the child at risk on an educational level. Bogaerts wanted to put forward a rationalistic educational project. This double analysis will reveal an interesting educational paradox: integral rationalistic educated children appear as Socialist propaganda tools.