History of education in France
The school system was modernized during the French Revolution, but roughly in the 18th and early 19th century debates ranged on the role of religion.
Prior to the establishment of the Roman empire, education in Gaul was a domestic task or provided by itinerant druids traveling in the Celtic Western Europe.
In 789, he published the Admonitio generalis, ordering that each bishopric organises a school for non-ecclesiastic students, which makes Charlemagne - not without exaggeration - to be considered the father of education in France.
By 1710 France had about 360 eight-year and six-year colleges; they provided classical education to about 50,000 young men from the ages of 10 to 20.
Faculties of the Université de France were organised as four categories (law, medicine, sciences, humanities), under the strict supervision from the government.
After more than a decade of closures, Napoleon set up lycées in 1802 as the main secondary education establishments targeting baccalauréat examinations.
A law of 1808 fixed the syllabus as "ancient languages, history, rhetoric, logic, music and the elements of mathematical and physical sciences".
Statistical analysis of census data indicates the steady spread of universal, compulsory, elementary education.
Commercial and manufacturing interests sponsored more schools in their districts to obtain a more skilled work force capable of more complex operations such as sales, accounting, and supervising.
However, families spent even more money for private schools, lay and Catholic, which in 1865 enrolled more pupils than the public system at the secondary level.
On the left was a coalition determined to weaken Catholicism in France, and especially its political support for royalism and its opposition to republicanism.
Proposed by the Republican Minister of Public Instruction Jules Ferry, they were a crucial step in the secularization of the Third Republic (1871–1940).
[8] Republicans feared that since religious orders, especially the Jesuits and Assumptionists, controlled the schools they must be teaching royalist ideas that students should not be allowed to hear.
The main attack came early in the 20th century, when the coalition secured a strong majority in parliament in a series of elections.
Their main target of attack was the religious orders, most famously the Assumptionists (who controlled a powerful newspaper) and the old Jesuit enemy, but many others as well, who operated Catholic schools across France.
The parties of the Left, Socialists and Radicals, united upon this question in the Bloc republicain, supported Combes in his application of the law of 1901 on the religious associations, and voted the new bill on the congregations (1904).
Under his guidance parliament moved toward the 1905 French law on the separation of Church and State, which ended the Napoleonic arrangement of 1801.
The government nominally took control of Catholic churches, cemeteries, and schools, but in practice, they allowed local congregations to continue using them.
In 1985, the education minister, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, announced a target of "80% of an age group to reach baccalauréat level".
