War-damaged Children and Young People

Due to the lack of comprehensive international regulations for the protection of civilian populations, the impact of World War II on the young people of the warring countries was disastrous: children and young people were actually the sector of the population most damaged by the war.

This could be seen in many ways. Twenty-five million civilians died in World War II. Deportations, forced labour, mass population movements, death and undernourishment were ever-present realities, varying more or less according to the country and the population group. The social network which supported these people was partially destroyed at the end of the war; there remained many orphans and neglected and delinquent youngsters who presented educational problems.

The Creation of Children’s Communities

After 1945, many individuals and institutions set out to help these war-damaged young people. In addition to material aid, another kind of support system came into being: the founding of child care establishments to care for war-damaged children and adolescents. Such communities arose spontaneously – often independently of one another, and without financial resources in Germany, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Poland, Switzerland, and Hungary, and were given various names: children’s villages, children’s towns, children’s republics, children’s homes or youth settlements.

Individual educators in conjunction with voluntary bodies took the initiative to found these establishments. Although their educational concepts and characteristics varied, they had one thought in common: raising war-damaged children called for new educational ideas. The main characteristic of these children’s communities was that of group or cooperative education -- these children were to be raised as a new generation filled with hope for peace and capable of international cooperation.

An exemplary experiment among all these new foundations was the idea of a "little Europe" in the Pestalozzi Children’s Village in Trogen, Switzerland . Even before the project took on concrete form, this children’s village drew world-wide interest in the educational community, even though communications were difficult at the time.

Children’s Communities and Community Aid in the Post-war Period

Countless public and private charity endeavours set out to combat the terrible distress following World War II. These were a spontaneous response to emergency needs. A necessary prerequisite for community reconstruction was material aid. Help on the material level was also distributed to the newly-founded children’s communities, and thus this new form of children’s institution became very widely known. Only this way could gradual public recognition for this new means of post-war reconstruction be gained.

The Allied Education Ministers’ Conference (CAME), which met regularly in London from 1942 to 1945, had already recognized children’s communities as a valuable support system for resocializing children and adolescents damaged by the war. UNESCO, the successor of CAME, also recognized the problems of war-damaged children and the role the founding of children’s villages could play: they became an official part of UNESCO policy.

UNESCO passed a resolution to undertake a study on the effect of the war on young people at its first general conference. The Second UNESCO General Conference passed a resolution to create a research and action plan in conjunction with other national and international organizations to deal with the problem of educating war-damaged children and to make a field study on the most significant experiments in this area. As a result of this resolution, Bernard Drzewieski (Poland), who was then head of the UNESCO Reconstruction Department, paid particular attention to the work of children’s communities.

FICE is founded

International interest in children’s communities led to further UNESCO activities. A meeting of heads of children’s villages and other interested persons was called by UNESCO at the Pestalozzi Children’s Village in Trogen, Switzerland, in order to found an international organization of children’s communities.

In the winter of 1948, Bernard Drzewieski called together a small group of people to inform them about the idea of this international conference; at the time, the goals of the new organization were not yet clear. It was only while preparing the conference that the following themes crystallized: Raising war-damaged children in children’s communities and founding a coordinating committee of the heads of these villages.

The meeting of the heads of children’s villages, child care staff, psychologists, social workers, and numerous observers and UNESCO workers from eleven UNESCO member states took place in the Pestalozzi Children’s Village in Trogen on July 5 – 11, 1948.

At this conference, UNESCO provided a forum for the children’s communities, permitting these establishments, which had often had to struggle for survival and for respect for their educational methods, to step out of their isolation and experience a sense of solidarity.

One result of this meeting in Trogen was a resolution which defined the basic principles of the children’s communities. The high point of the conference, however, was the founding of the "Federation Internationale des Communautés d’Enfants (FICE)" on July 10, 1948 at the Pestalozzi Children’s Village, Trogen and Heiden, Switzerland.

The main goals of this new organization were the exchange of specialized information and the spreading of new ideas on residential child care. The participants at the conference also saw FICE as an instrument of cultural exchange and understanding between different nations.

A further international development which dealt with children’s communities was the establishment of International Study Weeks for the War-damaged Child (SEPEG), which began in Switzerland in 1945.

Prime Movers: Elisabeth Rotten and Bernard Drzewieski

As soon as the educational reformer Elisabeth Rotten (1882-1964), Switzerland, heard of the plan to build the Pestalozzi Children’s Village in Trogen, she spontaneously offered her help. Like many others, she also considered the resocialization of war-damaged children as a chance to further international understanding. Elisabeth Rotten, who devoted her life to cooperative efforts for peace, humanity, and education took part in the international movement for reform in and outside schools from the beginning of the 20th century onward, the New Education Fellowship. Her great experience and international connections in the field of child care contributed enormously to the organization and growth of the newly-founded FICE.

Another key figure was Bernard Drzewieski (1888-1953), Poland, who did his best to gain international recognition for FICE. For five years during World War II, he had worked for the Polish government in exile in London as head of the Education Department. After UNESCO was founded, he was asked to lead the Reconstruction Department. Bernard Drzewieski, who became an international expert on educational questions in the course of his career, focused his interest above all on aid to war-damaged, abandoned children. On lecture tours and at fund-raising events, he talked about the necessity for children’s communities and about the difficulties they encountered. He served as supporter and adviser to FICE, whose growth was of primary importance to him.

1949 – 1978: ORGANIZATION, DEVELOPMENT, AND TRANSFORMATION

Goals, Methods, National Sections

Once FICE was founded in Trogen in 1948, a co-ordination committee created a legal base for the new organisation. The first task of this committee was to define the concept of children’s communities:

"Children’s communities are permanent educationaI establishments in which modern education and teaching methods are founded on the active participation of the children and young people in the life of the community, combining family life with different kinds of collective life."

This definition was the criterion for admitting further children’s communities into the FICE of that time.

The main goal of FICE was to found and support such children’s communities. It was to be reached by uniting the children’s communities through cooperation and international contacts between child care staff, furthering international contacts among children, and contributing research materials for publication. To increase the influence and to widen the field of activities of the new and as yet unknown organization, the coordination committee named national representatives, but it soon became clear that this task could not be carried out by representatives alone.

That is why numerous European organizations joined FICE in the period from 1949-1957: France (1949), Belgium (1949), Italy (1949), Luxembourg (1950), Switzerland (1951), Federal Republic of Germany (1956), United Kingdom (1956), German Democratic Republic (1957). The first organization from a non-European country to join was FICE-lsrael, in 1955. These national sections sometimes have a different name than FICE-lnternational, for example Association Nationale des Communautés Educatives (ANCE), Internationale Gesellschaft fur Heimerziehung (IGfH), Internationale Vereinigung von Kindergemeinschaften, Nationale Vereinigung der Kinderfreunde, or Narodni Sdruzeni Detskych Domoru.

UNESCO and FICE

We have seen what an important part UNESCO played in the founding of FICE. Without the active help of UNESCO, the newly founded organization would not have survived. The resolution proclaiming close cooperation between FICE and UNESCO, which was passed by the founding conference at Trogen and Heiden in 1948, included the following points: organization of conferences and publication of conference reports and articles dealing above all with the problems, experience, and activities of children’s communities.

The FICE coordination committee travelled to Paris headquarters regularly in order to take part in UNESCO meetings. Because FICE needed to become much better known and because the children’s communities could serve as a kind of model of democratically-run communities, UNESCO gave FICE access to its publications and other media. The high point in this activity was a big radio broadcast about children’s communities in Europe.

But this was not enough to consolidate FICE. After the UNESCO Reconstruction Department was dissolved, FICE was threatened with the loss of the moral and financial support of UNESCO. That is why the conscientious Bernard Drzewieski tried to gain consultative status with the UNESCO Executive Council for FICE. This would have created a contractual basis for relations between FICE and UNESCO and served as grounds for UNESCO funding. A first FICE proposal failed in 1949 due to adverse votes from the United States and the United Kingdom UNESCO-Commissions. The refusal was based on the observation that FICE was not yet a solid organization, that it dealt with a secondary aspect of education, and that it included few national sections.

Further negotiations eventually led to success, however: in 1954, FICE was recognized as an Non-governmental Organization (NGO) by UNESCO and was given consultative status. This was a very welcome sign of appreciation for FICE’s endeavours. Unfortunately, Bernard Drzewieski did not live to see this development. He died in 1953.

Relations with UNESCO were further strengthened when the Canadian UNESCO-Committee for Reconstruction made funds available to build an internationai centre at the Pestalozzi Children’s Village in Trogen. This centre was to be used for congresses in the fields of psychology, medicine, and child care, to provide training courses for child care staff, and to act as a permanent FICE office.

The architect Hans Fischli, who also built the Children’s Village, drew up the plans for this international centre, the Canada Hall at Trogen. A contract between the Children’s Village, FICE, and UNESCO agreed in 1950 that the two educational organizations may use the Canada Hall for twelve weeks per year.

International Youth Camps and Training Courses for Child Care Staff

Most of the children living in children’s communities had never experienced harmonious family life. They had suffered directly or indirectly from the violence of war. This is why so much educational emphasis was put on integrating these children into their immediate environment, their society, their country, and even the community of nations as a whole. FICE organized international youth camps and training courses to help put these goals into practice.

The first initiative to establish a youth camp did not come from within FICE itself, but rather from youngsters living in a French children’s republic. They contacted FICE with the wish to share the experiences they had in their autonomous children’s institution with other young people living in similar establishments. Fifty young people from various places lived together for two weeks in a miniature united nations. In the years that followed, young people from nine countries went to similar camps in Luxembourg and Germany.

UNESCO had begun the tradition of international training courses for child care staff in 1948 by calling the first conference of heads of children’s communities in Trogen. FICE included the organization of training courses for child care staff in its goals; in the first years after its founding, further meetings took place in Switzerland, Italy, France, and the Federal Republic of Germany.

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