Colleges, Petites Ecoles, and Academies: The Educational Context of Fleury’s Traite

Abstract

The practice of education in seventeenth-century France was in large measure the implementation in an organized way of sixteenth-century educational thought. Rabelais, Erasmus, Budé, Vives, Montaigne, Ramus, and many other humanists in France and elsewhere, marked the beginning of the age of the great educational theoreticians.¹ Their works helped sixteenth-century man, newly conscious of his cultural heritage, to preserve it and pass it on to coming generations.