Ovide Decroly

Ovide Decroly (Renaix, Belgium, 1871 – Uccle, 1932) was a Belgian educator trained as a physician, whose work joined psychology, neurology and classroom practice. He is remembered as one of the figures of the New Education movement in the early twentieth century, and his ideas still shape active teaching methods in many schools.

He qualified in medicine in Brussels in 1897 and continued his training in Berlin and Paris, where he studied neurology and psychiatry. Back in Belgium he worked on the re-education of children with learning disabilities. In 1901 he opened a centre for such children in his own house in Brussels, and in 1907 he founded the École de l'Ermitage in Ixelles, known for its motto "school for life through life". There he applied, to children of ordinary intelligence, methods first tested with children considered irregular. In 1920 he became professor of psychology and educational hygiene at the University of Brussels. He died in 1932, after a serious illness that had begun in 1930.

His thinking starts from the idea that education should respond to the child's needs. Decroly identified four basic needs: feeding, shelter, self-protection, and activity, whether alone or with others, through recreation and self-improvement. From this comes his principle of globalisation: children perceive and learn through meaningful wholes linked to their interests rather than through isolated subjects. This principle took shape in the "centres of interest" method, which organised learning around topics close to the pupil and used play as a free and enjoyable activity. For reading and writing he proposed the ideo-visual method, which combines observation, analysis and synthesis of words and ideas. He also replaced the word "language" with "expression", covering gesture, handwork, speech, writing and the arts.

His written work includes The Educational Game (1932) and La fonction de la globalisation, along with studies of intelligence testing and of children's emotional life. His influence survives in schools that follow his approach, such as the École Decroly in Uccle, and in the conviction that learning should start from experience and from each child's real needs.