Education Napoleon's educational reforms laid the foundation of a modern system of secondary and tertiary education in France and throughout much of Europe. He synthesized academic elements from the Ancien Régime, The Enlightenment, and the Revolution. His education laws of 1802 left most primary education in the hands of religious or communal schools which taught basic literacy and numeracy for a minority of the population. He abolished the revolutionary central schools and replaced them with secondary schools and elite lycées where the curriculum was based on reading, writing, mathematics, Latin, natural history, classics, and ancient history.
Education Napoleon's educational reforms laid the foundation of a modern system of secondary and tertiary education in France and throughout much of Europe. He synthesized academic elements from the Ancien Régime, The Enlightenment, and the Revolution His education laws of 1802 left most primary education in the hands of religious or communal schools which taught basic literacy and numeracy for a minority of the population. He abolished the revolutionary central schools and replaced them with secondary schools and elite lycées where the curriculum was based on reading, writing mathematics, Latin, natural history, classics, and ancient history