Tracing the history of humanism in international education: The role of the UNESCO Institute for Education and the International Review of Education

On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the International Review of Education (IRE), this article looks back at the history of varied expressions of humanistic and hermeneutic thinking in international and comparative education as reflected in the activities and publications of the UNESCO Institute for Education (UIE) and its journal, IRE. After tracing the influences of a range of educational thinkers from different but overlapping philosophical traditions that engaged with the institute and the journal in the post-World War II period, we focus our attention on a particular line of work in the field of lifelong learning and literacy, which was inspired by the German comparative educationist Gottfried Hausmann and, to some extent, Paulo Freire. In the final section, we relate the humanistic philosophy of education to contemporary standardized and outcome-based discourses of education and reflect on the contemporary use of ideas with a humanistic connotation such as social and emotional learning and mindfulness, re-appearing in a truncated and marketized form.