For the New Education, educational action is part of the permanent movement of historical, political, cultural and social contexts, indissociable from individuals and environments. Sharing the deep conviction that each∙e has the capacity to appropriate, to act and to transform reality in order not to suffer it, our educational action must take into account the evolutions of the contexts while basing the action of the Educator on the consideration of realities. If the educational action we lead is based on values and convictions, it cannot stop at certainties or dogmas. It is these permanent movements that make the New Education always new because it is constantly renewed.
One hundred years after the first founding congress of the International League of New Education (Calais 1921), the CEMEA, the CRAP-Cahiers Pédagogiques, the FESPI, the FICEMEA, the FIMEM, the GFEN, the ICEM, the LIEN create a new international dynamic: “Convergence(s) for New Education”. This creation was made possible by what these movements were able to produce together in 2017 and in 2019 during the two International Biennials of New Education in Poitiers. Today, they share the political challenge of restoring the New Education to its rightful place in the international educational stakes. Making an alliance, creating the conditions for a better Convergence(s) are major political necessities when we have to fight against the commodification of Education, when the pedagogies put forward enslave and instrumentalise more than they promote emancipation, when competition is at the heart of the educational processes whereas our conceptions are based on the dimensions of cooperation, mutual aid and active education. For these reasons, and many others, it was necessary to create Convergence(s).
This creation was made possible by what these movements were able to produce together in 2017 and in 2019 during the two International Biennials of New Education. Today, they share the political challenge of restoring New Education to its rightful place in international educational issues. Making an alliance, creating the conditions for a better Convergence(s) are major political necessities when we have to fight against the commodification of Education, when the pedagogies put forward enslave and instrumentalise more than they promote emancipation, when competition is at the heart of the educational processes whereas our conceptions are based on the dimensions of cooperation, mutual aid and active education. For these reasons, and many others, it was necessary to create Convergence(s).
At the official launch on 3 July in Calais, we recalled what the 1921 Calais Congress was, who was there and how it was a landmark event. We made the link with today’s issues, which see the birth of “Convergence(s)”, by affirming the militant ambitions of the Manifesto to come: a political manifesto affirming the militant ambitions, the concrete utopias, the founding and intangible references of the New Education on the subjects and acts that mobilise our movements.
It is the forthcoming Biennial (October 2022) that will welcome the Manifesto drafted as one of the elements of a shared political project and will make it public. Mobilising activists, it will play its role as an open and dynamic space allowing, in confidence: knowledge, confrontation, exchange, dispute … and wonder! It will potentially be the first to open up to other organisations that apply the principles and values of the new education on a daily basis, while inscribing their associative projects in political logics different from those of the founding organisations. The new orientations of the forthcoming Biennials will include the dimensions of “provocation”, “dispute” and “movement” that have marked the congresses of the Ligue Internationale de l’Education Nouvelle. It was clearly the spirit of the International League to be able to reinforce convergences without running away from the necessary debates on divergences.
To join Convergence(s) or for more information : Contact us
This is how the visual can be understood: a certain fragmentation, a fragmentation, but a real dynamic that converges!