L’Enseignant, entre exigences hygiéniques et educatives: ecoles de plein air et colonies de vacances (France, Italie, Suisse 1919-1945)

Open-air schools and holiday camps originated in the medico-hygienist movement that swept Europe between the second half of the 19th andthe beginning of the 20th century (Châtelet et alii, 2003; D'Ascenzo, 2018 and 2023) and shared the primary objective of providing a healthyenvironment for vulnerable children at risk of tuberculosis. These experiences, which are also influenced by a much older movement of thoughtthat sees the natural environment as a particularly suitable place for education (Comenius, 1657; Rousseau, 1762; Pestalozzi, 1774; Fröbel,1826), are also characterised by a particularly innovative approach from a pedagogical point of view. Teachers at open-air schools and holiday camps – in the latter case often still teachers on summer break – working in a context that wasdistinctly health-related and very different from the traditional school, gradually developed a new way of teaching. In open-air schools, thetraditional school model of transmissive teaching relegated to the closed space of the classroom is superseded, and daily school life lived innature, in more open spaces, with adapted teaching furniture, is proposed in order to motivate pupils - whose health problems are oftenaccompanied by educational poverty - to learn (D'Ascenzo, 2018 and 2019). In the case of holiday colonies, the original idea, which wasessentially health-related – the beneficial effects of fresh air and the sea – is combined with an educational approach based on direct contactwith nature; although in some colonies an authoritarian approach prevailed – the Italian “colonie” of the fascist period come to mind (Mira andSalustri, 2019) – other camps appeared to be a context propitious to the development of a new approach to education – both in and out ofschool – which placed greater emphasis on direct experience, the physical dimension, the expressiveness of individuals, debate and thecommunity dimension. This contribution, by examining three specific cases (open-air school and heliotherapeutic colony ‘Casa del Sole’, Milan, Italy; Colonia deiSindacati di Rodi, Switzerland; Préventorium Saint-Laurent de Plérin, France), aims to highlight the fruitful intersection of the medical andpedagogical dimensions in these initiatives, which are clearly distinct from the traditional educational context; an intersection which, while notnew in the history of education (Itard, 1801 and 1806; Montessori, 1909), was of particular interest to the teaching profession in the first half ofthe 20th century.