L’éducation à l’épreuve du pire, 1939-1942
Education facing the worst fate of all (1939-1942)Warsaw 1939-1942 – three brief years – constitute the last chapter in the educational career of Janusz Korczak, the man who claimed that the only real revolution is education. These were the days when his approach to teaching – the Korczak approach –...
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Idioma: | Français |
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2010
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| Accés en línia: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sumari: | Education facing the worst fate of all (1939-1942)Warsaw 1939-1942 – three brief years – constitute the last chapter in the educational career of Janusz Korczak, the man who claimed that the only real revolution is education. These were the days when his approach to teaching – the Korczak approach – found itself facing the challenge posed by the Nazi’s project to annihilate the Jewish people.Although there could not be any “victory” against the machine of the Reich, “life despite of everything” paradoxically managed to reign in this oasis in the middle of a hell that was then the Orphans’ House. The few survivors of these three nightmarish years help us to better understand how they managed to go on living.The article asks the following question : can this historical account and the stories related teach us something about our present “here and now” life ? The article is based on rare testimonies of those who survived the experience of living in the orphanage until the summer of 1942.The main document is published here for the first time in French. It was written by Yona Bocian, a young stagiaire educator at the orphanage between 1939 and 1942, whose complete text is published in the appendix. Two other testimonials complete the presentation : one by the teacher Misha Wroblewski and another more extensive one given by Shmuel Gogol, one of the oldest children in the orphanage. By an irony of fate, both Wroblewski and Gogol owed their salvation to the narrow dimensions of the last premises allocated to children in the ghetto. The cramped conditions forced some of the older children to be accommodated separately from the smallest children, thus saving their lives.The question raised here is not an academic one but rather an empirical inquiry. Can the approach of Korzac to child rearing be relevant in today’s world under very different conditions than the extremely harsh ones that existed during the Holocaust ? Even if the answer is polemic, the act of questioning continues to preoccupy many teachers, particularly those who have the responsibility to pass on history. |
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