This paper will look at different ways in which formal and non-formal education in a particular branch of the Luxembourgian and Belgian school systems both facilitated and hindered trajectories of enculturation based on target groups’ socio-cultural and linguistic background. More concretely, this paper will present a comparative analysis of the open-air schools founded in Dudelange and Esch-sur-Alzette in 1913 and 1928 and those established in Schoten, Brasschaat and Schilde in 1936, 1954 and 1963. The former were connected to ARBED, a steel concern which soon became a major world player, and to the engineer Emile Mayrisch and the networks in which he and his wife and daughter, Aline Mayrisch-de Saint-Hubert and Andrée Mayrisch, were involved. The latter were associated to networks around another ‘self-made’ captain of industry, Lieven Gevaert, and to the photographic company set up by him, which in turn was to become a company of international stature. The Luxembourgian and Belgian schools served quite different clienteles and may have exposed them to corresponding regimes of practice. The former recruited ‘overstrained’ ‘heart patients’, ‘lung patients’, and ‘scrofulous’ and ‘anaemic’ children of ARBED workers manifesting ‘worrisome’ and ‘morbid’ ‘constitutional conditions’ such as ‘underdevelopment’ or ‘nervousness’, not seldom associated with a ‘hereditary defect’ (Ewert & Urbany, 1914; Heirens, 1930). The latter catered for a healthy, wealthy and partly elitist Flemish-Catholic population (Thyssen, 2009). That said, both types of schools can be situated in a similar range of educationally conceived social reforms pursued by industrialists across Europe which constituted an ‘archipelago’ of school-, health care-, child and youth welfare-, and housing, life style and consumer culture-provisions commonly assigned to the realm of the State (de Swaan, 1988). This paper, then, will examine to what extent the open-air schools associated to Mayrisch and Gevaert – neither of whom became directly involved in the State apparatus but nonetheless managed to exert influence upon it through their networks – promoted preferred pathways to cultural 'belonging’ on the basis of more or less socio-cultural and linguistic diversity. The paper will also study how the schools may have intended to respond on this basis to challenges and risks attributed to major societal transitions of the time, whose and what kind of interests they served, whether they served common goals despite evident differences, and what remained of their strategies in practice. While the Luxembourg and Belgian schools came to operate in particular contexts and target distinct audiences, a main hypothesis of the paper is that everything from the schools’ geographical implantation, to their recruitment policies, to their curricular plans, to the ‘materialities of schooling’ (Lawn & Grosvenor, 2005; Priem, König & Casale, 2012) they facilitated, and to their (self-)representation in images shows contradictory yet similar notions of what constituted adequate educational trajectories of enculturation in response to societal transitions.

- Johann Ewert & Albert Urbany, Die Waldschule der Stadt Düdelingen, gegründet 1913 durch die vereinigten Hüttenwerke Arbed, Abteilung Düdelingen. Einrichtung und Organisation im ersten Jahre ihres Bestehens. Luxembourg: Soupert, s.a. [1914] - Nicolas Heirens, Die Escher Waldschule als Kindertagesheim. Separatabdruck aus der “Luxemburger Zeitung”. Luxembourg: Schwell, 1930. - Martin Lawn & Ian Grosvenor (Eds.), Materialities of Schooling: Design, Technology, Objects, Routines. Oxford: Symposium Press, 2005; - Karin Priem, Gudrun König & Rita Casale (Eds.), “Die Materialität der Erziehung: Kulturelle und soziale Aspekte pädagogischer Objekte”. Special Issue. Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, nr. 58, 2012. - Abram de Swaan, In Care of the State: Health Care, Education and Welfare in Europe and the USA in the Modern Era. Cambridge/Oxford: Polity Press, 1988. - Geert Thyssen, “Between Utopia and Dystopia? Case Studies of Open-Air Schools in Belgium, France, Germany and Italy (1904-1979).” Doctoral Dissertation, University of Leuven, 2009.