L’ECOLE POUR TOUS

For the 9th numero of “Great battles of the Republic”, “School for everyone” attacks the Jules Ferry’s laws (1882). Jules Ferry has been the hatest man of his time and his fame is radically opposed to extreme detestation that surrounded him when he was alive. This contrast between contemporary violence and posthumous glory informs us at the first sight on the energy and the bravery he had for taken a step to republican teaching, as well as the order of concrete progress than the collective memory.

Where are the major principles which found the glory and assure Ferry’s laws durability, after more than a century? Experience leads to moderate a bit consequenses without really call into question validity. Maybe it could remain the conviction that we can advance people through secular education, free and obligatory. But we know that it’s to the condition that school stops all fanaticism and fundamentalim in front of its doors; that doesn’t struggle it by  an opposite intolerance and that it knows that general decisions, which formely had so much virtue, have to agree now, after experience, to modulations which take into account diversity of individual and familial situations.