ABSTRACT
In the course of the period 1660–1720, and as a result of the reforming zeal of the Bishops, the great majority of charity schools developed in French towns. This immense campaign which aimed to reduce the ‘prodigious ignorance’ of the poor (as well as police them) jointly embraced both a public (notably the poorer people) and a corpus of knowledge appropriate to their upbringing. In excluding the learning of the rudiments of latin from his schools Jean Baptist de la Salle created a boundary that did not exist in J. de Batencourt’s The Parochial School (1654). He combined a pedagogic programme with a socially determined clientele.
