ABSTRACT
The structure of the French educational system cannot truly be called a rational piece of architecture, and this irrationality distresses those who are working hard to reshape it. 1 The whole system of schools and higher institutions is often referred to by the Napoleonic term ‘Universite’, but it is not so monolithic as it sounds. The introduction to a bill designed in 1957 2 to reform the organization of schools expounds its unsatisfactory nature in these terms:
‘The present organization of the French public education system is not the result of a unified concept rigorously implemented; it is only explicable by its history in the course of which the divers elements of one school system were successively put in their place without any link between them.
