section_path: Reforms/Education
section_name: Education
paragraph_text: 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.
  
  He retained the revolutionary higher education system, with grandes écoles in professions including law, medicine, pharmacy, engineering and school teaching. He introduced grandes écoles in history and geography, but opposed one in literature because it was not vocational. He also founded the military academy of Saint Cyr. He promoted the advanced centres, such as the École Polytechnique, that provided both military expertise and advanced research in science.
  
  In 1808, he founded the Imperial University, a supervisory body with control over curriculum and discipline. The following year he introduced the baccalaureate. The system was designed to produce the efficient bureaucrats, technicians, professionals and military officers that the Napoleonic state required. It outperformed its European counterparts, many of which borrowed from the French system.
  
  Female education, in contrast, was designed to be practical and religious, based on home science, the catechism, basic literacy and numeracy, and enough science to eradicate superstition.