Education amongst the peasantry of nineteenth-century France continued to be dominated by the Medieval notion of apprenticeship. Following this approach, children were plunged headlong into the world of adults as early as possible in order to learn the ‘art of living’ from those around them. All of the ideas, the beliefs and the values of peasant society were transmitted in this way, as well as the manual skills needed for work. In the absence of specialized institutions, education melted imperceptibly into the normal round of activities in the village. However, as the century wore on, this informal type of education came increasingly to be supplanted by a new rival: the elementary school. A very different philosophy of education was percolating down from middle- and upper-class circles, one which required children to be sheltered from an outside world judged too dangerous and too corrupt for their sensibilities. Children were now to be taught systematically in the cloistered atmosphere of the school, before being launched on their chosen occupations. The profound upheaval in customs that this extension of childhood implied was not to be achieved in the short term. The movement to school the population was spread over several centuries, starting in the case of primary education with the petites écoles of the reign of Louis XIV, and ending with the free, compulsory schooling of the Third Republic.