ABSTRACT
Surprisingly perhaps, the concept of an international education has had a long history. Certainly, prior to World War II, the realization of what war between nation states can bring in human misery and degradation was a major incentive in the desire of many liberal-thinking people to promote the concept of internationalism as a counter-balance to nationalism. As an essential element in pursuing and maintaining world peace, the education of the young, which focused on how nations and peoples can work in harmony to achieve international cooperation and understanding, became an important means by which to achieve this balance. At the forefront of this endeavour, the International School of Geneva was formed in 1924 with these aims in mind. As Paul Mantoux, the Director of the Political Section of the League of Nations succinctly put it in 1931: ‘Brutal events have supplied evidence of a truth that had been slowly gaining ground, namely, the interdependence of nations and the need for establishing in the world an order and harmony hitherto lacking. It was not owing to some impulse of dreamy love for mankind in the abstract but rather for the sake of their own countries that the promoters of international education set to work’.
