In 1881, French Prime Minister Jules Ferry pushed through laws mandating free public education for all French children—and the next year made free secular education mandatory.  At the time, Baron Pierre de Coubertin was still in his teens, having just graduated from St. Ignace, a Jesuit day school in Paris, but he would soon become part of the great educational reform movement Ferry had launched.  By the end of the 1880s, the Baron was among the most influential leaders in the French amateur sports movement, driving forward the goal of integrating sport into French education.  From those roots, the Baron would launch a global movement designed to place sport everywhere at the service of humanity—always with an emphasis on the educational value of exercise and sport.  As this quote indicates, the philosophy of Olympism, which still guides the Olympic Movement today, is based on the idea that an “athletic education accessible to all” can serve as the foundation for a healthy civil society in any nation.  This passage is taken from “Olympic Letter III: Olympism and Education,” which the Baron wrote in 1918.

“(Olympism) advocates a broad-based athletic education accessible to all, trimmed with manly courage and the spirit of chivalry, blended with esthetic and literary demonstrations, and serving as an engine for national life and as a basis for civic life. That is its ideal program. Now can it be achieved?”