From Educational Justice to Social Justice

The mission that the IBE set itself was to universalise access to schooling. The 1930s exemplify this voluntarist policy of schooling to which the IBE invited governments and their ministerial delegates. Later, it was a question of taking into account and adjusting to conditions and environments, but also of respecting the diversity of aptitudes and interests of each individual, in order to recognise their specific identity. At the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, the key words of social justice and equality of opportunity were used as if they were self-evident. The ideology of merit, which was already very much in evidence in the inter-war period, was sometimes confirmed and sometimes challenged. An insert shows the conferences’ awareness that universal access to education implies material and institutional infrastructures.