Ĉu vere Esperanto kaj ĝia instruado ne estus grava kaj justa solvo por plibonigi interpopolan komprenon? (Couldn't Esperanto and its teaching be a relevant and fair solution to promote a better understanding between people?)

During the first half of the 20th century, then in the inter-war period, numerous initiatives appeared in order to produce and share transnational reflections related to the educational field. As part of a broader internationalist impulse covering different domains (political, humanitarian, scientific, cultural, etc.) and initiated at the end of the 19th century (Iriye, 1997; Sluga, 2013), this educational internationalism aims to make the educational field the privileged terrain of international interconnections to preserve peace on earth (Droux & Hofstetter, 2015; Hofstetter, Droux, & Christian, 2020). Among the multiple pedagogical issues brought to the forefront, there is the cause of Esperanto at school. Invented in 1887 by the Polish Louis Lazare Zamenhof, Esperanto gradually crossed borders thanks to a transnational network that ensured its propagation through associations, congresses and publications (Garvia, 2015; Forster, 1982). For its promoters, Esperanto was intended to become the international auxiliary language common to all the countries of the world, and the introduction of its teaching in public schools began to be an issue that was taken up by actors from various fields, giving rise to reflections and practical experiments, not without any resistances. Among these protagonists, convinced of the educational and pacifist values of this artificial language, were actors from the scientific field, such as the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Geneva, intergovernmental actors (Schneuwly, Darme-Xu, Extermann, Leopoldoff & Rouiller, 2021), such as the International Bureau of Education (IBE) and, of course, within the Esperanto movement itself, in particular the Internacia Asocio de Instruistoj (International Association of Teachers), on which this presentation intends to focus.

Founded in 1908, the Internacia Asocio de Instruistoj has several objectives: to promote Esperanto among teachers, students, and in schools all over the world; to facilitate the relationship between teachers and between students from different countries; to centralize and share information about the Esperanto movement in schools; and, more broadly, to discuss various educational topics. In this sense, the association organizes its annual general assembly on the occasion of the Universal Congress of Esperanto. In addition, the association has a central organ since its creation, which takes the form of a review, Internacia Pedogogia Revuo (International Pedagogical Review). Published in Esperanto by professors and teachers of different nationalities, this journal contains original articles as well as excerpts from national educational journals on various educational issues. In addition, it relates the successive initiatives undertaken by the Internacia Asocio de Instruistoj to advance the cause of Esperanto and its teaching worldwide.

This presentation will focus on the action of the Internacia Asocio de Instruistoj, which is fully in line with the educational internationalism flourishing during the 20th century. In this context, we will question the discourses and arguments (educational, pacifist, corporatist, etc.) put forward by this association, as well as the modes of action it uses to serve the cause of Esperanto at school. We will also ask ourselves how the commitment of this association, according to the profile of its members and the actions undertaken, is similar to or, on the contrary, different from the work carried out around this cause by other collective actors with different fields of expertise, such as intergovernmental organizations. For this purpose, our presentation will be mainly based on concepts and methods of transnational history (variation of scales, networks of actors). We will proceed to the qualitative analysis of the volumes of the Internacia Pedagogia Revuo successively published between 1908 and 1939, insofar as they testify particularly well to the action carried out by the Internacia Asocio de Instruistoj around the cause of Esperanto at school. Moreover, the chosen periodization will allow us to understand the trajectory of this teachers' association with regard to a changing context: the foundation of the association while the first experiments in Esperanto were taking place at school; the outbreak of the First World War, which first slowed down the spread of Esperanto and then led to its revival for pacifist purposes; its reconsideration due to the rise of nationalism, which prefigured the beginning of the Second World War; finally, the emergence, beside the pioneer Esperanto movement claiming its ideological and confessional neutrality, of a non-neutral group composed of Esperantist workers for whom Esperanto must contribute to the class struggle (Lins, 2015; Gobbo, 2017).

These are all contextual elements that we will take into account and that certainly had an impact on the evolution of this association, which is still active today. More broadly, through the study of the trajectory and action of this particular association, this presentation will make a novel contribution to the work on educational internationalism. It will highlight an original initiative to promote multilingualism in the school setting on a transnational scale: while the aspiration to multilingualism of the people through the school has been concretized, since the beginning of the 20th century and within many national territories, by an intensification of the study of natural foreign languages, this association of teachers from various countries proposes another solution, that of promoting, for all students, the teaching of an artificial and supposedly neutral idiom as a second language. This is another way of conceiving the study of languages at school, based on pacifist, universalist, pedagogical and democratic considerations, and the historical perspective of which can also echo current issues relating to the promotion of a multilingual and multicultural education as advocated by the Council of Europe and UNESCO.

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