Gabriel Compayré

Gabriel Compayré was a major contributor to the field of educational science and to the establishment of a free, secular, and mandatory system of public schools in late nineteenth-century France. He achieved this in part through his service as a deputy in the French parliament from 1881 to 1889, when he helped to develop educational policy alongside the politically moderate founders of the French Third Republic. Their political coalition succeeded in passing a series of laws that strengthened an already dominant state control over primary and secondary education, which in centuries past had mostly been under the responsibility of the Catholic ChurchCatholic Church. An even more important contribution to educational theory and practice in France and the world was Compayré’s work as a professor of philosophy and education, which allowed him to provide a scientific imprimatur to modern pedagogical principles that prioritized the student’s individual freedom and intellectual autonomy, over the mere assimilation of officially approved knowledge. He championed EnlightenmentEnlightenment values of individualism and independent inquiry, for example by claiming that their validity is confirmed by the emerging science of psychology, and that they are therefore consistent with biological as well as philosophical truths. Compayré was also a major historian of educational thought from classical antiquity to the present.