Resumen de L'éducation nouvelle après l'Education nouvelle
When it happens that a historian has been one of the actors ¿ and a militant actor ¿ of the period he or she is studying, should he or she decline to give an opinion for probable lack of objectivity? Or, on the contrary, should the historian seize the opportunity to bring together and allow a mutual confrontation between history through personal testimony and history through documentary evidence? The author has chosen the second option, not to talk about himself but to question his memories and, even more, those he has forgotten. When, in 1963, he carried out one of the first attempts at non-directive teaching in France, he did not make the connection between that pedagogical approach, stemming from Carl Rogers's work, and the trend of New Education. Yet that link existed at that time, in the field of social psychology, which the author was familiar with. And, in his own personal experience of childhood and adolescence (1943¿1950), he encountered New Education in the form of the child-centred pedagogy (pédagogie active) advocated by the youth movement in which he was an activist. But 10 years later (1959), having become a professor, he had somehow `forgotten' this past. The re-reading of these two periods undertaken by the elderly author in 2004 brings out two hypotheses that comprise and go beyond the account of his personal history: the Christian convictions of the author can explain the continuity between these two periods, although it may not easily be perceived at first, and changes in these convictions reveal certain `whys' behind the `forgetfulness'. Reflecting on this past of his, one observation stands out to the author: the extreme rarity of the experience of a relationship of equality between human beings (Merleau-Ponty). And for him one question remains unanswered: how do you touch someone's life without interfering in it? (Ric¿ur) (How do you educate someone without doing them harm?). These challenges seem to the author to be a common legacy of Christianity and of New Education. Both have always aimed at these ideals. And always missed. But Utopia and the impossible are linked, as everyone knows¿.
