How Napoleon Revolutionized The French Education System

5 Pages 1292 Words

The educational system of the Revolutionary period needed reform. Clergy and nobility called for improvements in the educational system to be made. When thinking of the problems of the 1789 educational system, being considered were “the duties and prerogatives of the state, the rights of parents, the potential benefits of higher education, the economic needs of the nation, the necessity for training teachers, and the suitable status of the teaching profession in a republic.” (Vignery 21)
A decree was passed in 1794 that named training teachers the top educational priority. With an emphasis now being placed on schooling, curriculums were changed. The Paris Normal school plan of study included “republican morality and public and private virtues, as well as the techniques of teaching reading, writing, arithmetic, practical geometry, French history and grammar.” (Bernard 154) Public secondary schools were established for every 300,000 people. These were the ecole centrals, or central schools. The secondary school curriculum included literature, language, science, and arts. A decree had been established that:
…the age-range of the pupils will be from eleven or twelve to seventeen or eighteen…every school is to have one professor of each of the following subjects: mathematics; experimental physics and chemistry; natural history; scientific methods and psychology; political economy and legislation; the philosophic history of peoples; hygiene; arts and crafts; general grammar; belles letters; ancient languages; the modern languages most appropriate to the locality of the school; painting and drawing. The teaching throughout will be in French. Every month there is to be a public lecture dealing with the latest advances in science and the useful arts. Every central school is to have attached to it a public library, a garden and a natural history collection, as well as a collection of scientific apparatus and of machines...