ABSTRACT
The principal characteristic of the period that we have just studied is, as we have seen, its admirable richness in matters of academic organisation: it is to that period that we owe the principal organs of our educational system. The contribution of the new epoch which we are now going to enter is of a completely different nature. The Renaissance is the era during which was elaborated the educational ideal by which France lived, to the exclusion of all others, from the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, and which, in more moderate form, still survives today alongside the new kind of academic system which has been struggling for some fifty years to get itself established. It was in schools informed by this ideal that were formed the basic traits of our national mentality as these emerged from the seventeenth century onwards, in other words, of our classical mentality. There is thus no need to point out the interest of the problem. It is the still controversial question of classical education with which we shall be dealing. Only, instead of treating it dialectically and analysing the totally subjective idea that each one of us may have of it, we shall begin by investigating objectively how this system of education was formed, what causes brought it into being, what was its nature, what influence it had on our intellectual evolution, all of which research is indispensable if one is to judge, with a full knowledge of the causes, what it was destined to become in the future.
