The paper will investigate the open-air school of Pont Rouge in Roubaix (France) in the frame of a larger, international process of hygienization, educationalization and medicalization. As early as 1914, the city of Roubaix considered the creation of a popular sports centre. Sportive concerns went together with social and hygienic preoccupations, put forward among others by the then socialist city mayor, Jean Lebas, and the councillor responsible for hygiene and public instruction, Doctor Léandre Dupré. The latter advocated para-scolastic measures to prevent children from working-class neighbourhoods from being affected by the “social plague” of tuberculosis and joining the city’s substantial group of “social misfits”. Around 1920, Doctor Dupré found land at the edge of industrial Roubaix’s suburbs that could serve as a playground for the city’s children, who were invited to spend time there under the watchful eyes of their teachers. But after two years it was deemed necessary to allow the most ‘needy’ among them to benefit from a longer stay. Thus, in June 1921, an ‘open-air school’ was founded, consisting only of tents – later military barracks – and other (second-hand) material. One year later, in 1922, the city council agreed to build a permanent open-air school, in the immediate proximity of the city, and linked to a sportive centre and holiday camp. The whole project was consigned to Jacques Greber, who had the school completed by 1931. Architecturally, the school was a hybrid in more than one sense: it had both innovative and conservative aspects, it was literally split in two according to both sexes and it even had a male and female principal responsible of its two respective sections. The question then arises whether the education offered within the school was equally hybrid? Some suggest it was all “space, open air”, and that “naturally a different kind of discipline installed itself” there where “one did not impose oneself” but “engaged” the children. They also point out that a more ‘individualized’ approach than in regular schools was adopted in that children were organised in classes not according to their age but their abilities. Nevertheless, the official programme still seems to have been followed as closely as possible. While some research has been done, mostly from an architectural point of view, much remains to be said about everyday educational practice from a historical-pedagogical perspective. The paper will try to fill this gap, using scholarly works and archival sources.

The paper will use scholarly works and archival sources and, if possible (given the fact that the research is carried out abroad in a limited time frame), oral testimonies. The methodology that will be used fits into the framework of new cultural histories and consists, among other things, of a historical variant of discourse analysis(, and eventual oral history methods).

As the paper is related to work that is still in progress - the archives are yet to be consulted, eventual interviews to be conducted - it is to early to draw any conclusions. It can however be expected that the school in its everyday educational practice was not as innovative and child-centred as some claim. Presumably, as in similar cases of open-air schools, some kind of 'paradox of educationalization' can be discerned. To what degree this is the case, however, remains to be investigated, since previously conducted research on open-air schools shows various forms and degrees of the aforementioned paradox.