The Soul of our Rural Schools
"EDUCATION, this designates anything that is able to enlighten us on any given thing. We educate ourselves through discourse, writings, reasoning, facts and examples".
Denis Diderot
The small school of Dardenay, where successive generations of young school pupils once wore their wooden clogs, saw its last teacher leave in 1964. The school has since been revived as a museum and is open to visitors, who are often moved by the school's unchanged atmosphere.
The school did not have a playground; instead the children would play in the village green, beneath the linden tree, and as soon as the teacher clapped his hands, the boys and girls (in smocks) would line up in rows of two, and then go into class and begin their day by studying "morality".
Some were sons and daughters of farmers, others of craftsmen and lock-keepers. Some liked school, and others did not. Some were talented, and others were not. For all of them, though, this was the golden time of their childhood. School was life.
Former pupils and the former teacher talk about it willingly on film. The atmosphere of the school is brought back to life through objects and documents on display. Desks, school books and pencil cases stand alongside posters of the human anatomy, and the traditional educational skeleton.
