While the world at large came to know Baron Pierre de Coubertin during his lifetime as le Rénovateur, the man who launched the Olympic Games, few knew of his work in education reform.  As he wrote the final assessment of his own work, The Unfinished Symphony, toward the end of his life, he drew a sharp contrast between the remarkable success of his Olympic efforts and the slow mole-like progress of the reforms he pushed in education.  At the time, he considered both works incomplete.  As the light of his life dimmed, he knew the Olympic Movement had to reach for greater heights to fulfill its destiny—and knew his educational reforms had much farther to go.

“Athletics - and especially its crowning glory, Olympism - has been the object, on my part of a somewhat noisy - and even, if you like, loud and insistent - development. It was the only way to achieve anything. The attempt to reform education, on the other hand, has been the object of slow, silent, gradual, and long thought-out study. Olympism has sailed serenely over the world like a gleaming airship, the reform of education has borrowed the method of moles, burrowing unseen a whole network of runs and raising veritable molehills here and there on the surface. But there is one thing they have in common: whether it was a matter of muscular training or improvement of the mind, the effort has, if I may say so, always been clearly defined and localized.”