ABSTRACT
The idyll of universal public instruction has been justified, at least since the educational projects of the French Revolution, by recourse to the principles of political economy. Talleyrand, in a parliamentary report of September 1791 on educational reform, wrote that ‘one should think of society as an enormous workshop’, in which the greatest of all economies was ‘the economy of men’, and where education could be considered ‘as a product of society, as a source of goods for society, and as an equally fertile source of goods for individuals’.1 For Lakanal, the educational theorist of the Jacobin period, in a parliamentary report published in December 1794, the value of educational ‘establishments’ was to be judged by their ‘utility’: ‘the famous Smith gave lectures in Edinburgh on commerce, of which the sum and the total formed The Essay on the Wealth of Nations, perhaps the most useful work for the peoples of Europe’.2
