ABSTRACT
FouRIER's ideal system dispenses with the Grammar School or its equivalent. Intellectual education is for him a means for the elucidation, improvement and furtherance of the industrial and moral life of the phalange. He does not believe in the ideal of "education for its own sake" .1 His aim is not to produce precocious savants, and so he has no time for academic learning as an end in itself. He contemptuously speaks of the scholars of his time, 2 as useless individuals capable of little else but the lining of their own pockets. Like communist scholars who view all in terms of Marxist theory, Fourier saw all which did not fit into his own framework as useless nonsense. Theoretical study, so he believes, must therefore be based around "analogies" and "attraction", the true explanation of life, as well as a practical or "mechanistic" guide to life.
