ABSTRACT
We saw in the last chapter how the educational theory of the Revolution stood in marked contrast to what had gone before. From the beginning of our academic history, from the Carolingian period, education had had man as its exclusive subject-matter: sometimes considered solely in his capacity as a logical being; sometimes, with the establishment of the humanities, as an integrated whole; and it is this which accounts for the formalism from which educational thinking never managed to escape. Never, I believe, has human thought carried anthropocentricity so far. The educational thought of the Revolution turned in precisely the opposite direction; it was towards the external world, towards nature that it directed itself. It was the sciences which tended to provide the centre of gravity for education.
