Apart from the major reforms carried out in the institutional organization of primary school (gratuity, obligation, secularism), the French Republicans in the late nineteenth century were willing to make a profound transformation of educational content and teaching standards. Experimental sciences have benefited greatly in 1882 and become a regular discipline of primary school, its programs and its time distribution. The lesson, teaching method which reformers were raving since the 1860s, will be closely and naturally associated with this teaching. It is indeed a first observation lesson or where students find they best opportunities to observe that in natural history lessons or basic physics? And related to each other, and science education and object lesson has two sides, one prosaic, another enchanted. Versant prosaic science education, for students who, for the most part, do not know of another school that the primary must be practical and conventional . If the lesson is particularly suitable for this teaching is that it focuses on concrete and familiar realities. Versant enchanted science education is a powerful instrument intellectual education (even moral and political education). It embodies the hope of a primary liberal education as complete, valid and worthy of its kind that classical humanities school. The lesson, matching the pedagogical approach to the same method of science (inductive method) becomes by allowing this intellectual education. This tension is not unique to science education. Analysis allows rather highlighting the double discourse that Republicans held on a school they simultaneously turned into reality and dream.
activity (student); elementary school; intellectual education; education practice; concrete education; science education; object lesson; inductive method; intuitive method; observation; pedagogy