Decroly, Ovide

DECROLY, OVIDE. - Born at Renaix (East Flanders) on 23 July 1871 and died at Brussels on 12 Sept. 1932, he is one of the most eminent representatives of the "new schools" movement. From the results obtained with normal children he was led to apply the same methods to normal children, for whom, in 1907, he opened at Ixelles an institute called, after the street in which it arose, Ecole de l'Ermitage. In 1914 D. obtained the chair of pedagogy at the higher institute of Bull Temps and in 1920 that of child psychology at the University of Brussels. D. bases his method on psychological foundations (to this end he had founded in 1905 the Belgian Society of Paedotechnics) and starts from the well-known principles of the active school, giving a system that is based on certain points, such as the environment, the composition of the classes, the premises, and takes on value and meaning above all in the so-called "centres of interest". Interest in D.'s conception is an active participation of the pupil in the life of the school, indeed in life, because the school, that is, the child's interest, is identified with the very life of man in his primordial and fundamental needs. If the centre of interest is, let us say, wool, it can give rise to a great variety of exercises, which can keep the attention and the mind of the children awake for a considerable period of time. Knowledge — and therefore the method that leads to it — would no longer be dispersed in a series of disciplines each detached from the others, but bound to a principle, to a centre, from which it would be articulated so as to recognize itself in every part as an aspect of a whole. From this principle is born in D. the other particular aspect of his system, which is the global method today adopted in the schools of many countries. The point is to grasp the word in its totality, which is the very reality of the word, and not in its syllabic fragmentation, which has no reason to exist in the child's consciousness. The child learns to pronounce the normal word, not the syllable, therefore he must learn to read and to write, not by analytically decomposing the word into syllables, but by inserting the word into the sentence. The adult can perform the analysis because he has already arrived and has consciousness of the synthesis.

D.'s method, with its centres of interest, is undoubtedly not lacking in fascination; but, on looking closely into it, it shows, at the very least, a particular limitation and insufficiency of its own. There is no doubt that if the principle is valid that there is no school where interest is lacking, it must nevertheless be said that interest must be alive and real and must not only start from the centre of man's life, but must invest the whole man, who is nature and is spirit; is body and is also soul; walks on the earth, but feels that the goal of his journey cannot be exhausted or concluded in this world. The child perceives that his interiority is rich in affections that bind him to the family, to society, to tradition, to religion, to God. If from the methodological point of view it may be good that the child be placed at the centre of the school, it must also be noted, and the child himself notes it, that outside, and above him, there is a truth toward which one must nevertheless strive with all the ardour and forces of the soul. The school must not give the child only the ability to cope in the environment in which he lives, but must bring it about that the child himself recognizes in himself a more concrete humanity that raises him to an ideal world which he would seek in vain within the circle of his life all woven of biological needs.

Studies: A. Hamaide, La méthode D., Neuchâtel-Paris 1922; E. Euguenin, La méthode D., in L'éducation, 1923; I. Dechamps, L'autoéducation à l'école appliquée au programme du dr. D., Brussels 1924; E. Flayol, Le dr. D. éducateur, Paris 1934;

E. Devaud, Le système D. et la pédagogie chrétienne, Brussels 1936 (Italian trans., in Per una scuola attiva secondo l'ordine cristiano, Brescia 1940); A. Ferrière, D., in Éducation, part 2, Feb. 1936, p. 68; Fr. De Moor, L'école active par la méthode de D., Brussels 1937; G. Gabrieli, La scuola in cammino, Florence 1938, pp. 102-33; E. Codignola, Le « Scuole nuove » e i loro problemi, ibid. n.d., pp. 74-79; E. Planchard, La pédagogie scolaire contemporaine, Tournai-Paris 1948, pp. 263-68 and passim.

Nino Sammartano