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 (pe...