The GENERAL CONTEXT of such use is:
the relative independence of educational systems: The organs of education are, in every age, connected with the other institutions of the social body, with customs and beliefs, with the great currents of thought. But they also have a life of their own, an evolution which is relatively autonomous in the course of which they conserve many features of their former structure. Sometimes they defend themselves against the influences exerted on them from outside, leaning on their past for support. It is impossible to understand, for example, the division of the universities into faculties, the systems of examinations and degrees, boarding-school life, school discipline, without going back a long way into the past, to the period of the construction of the institution whose forms, once created, tend to persist through time, either by a sort of inertia or because they manage to adapt to new conditions. Considered from this standpoint, the pedagogical organization appears to us as more hostile to change, more conservative and traditional perhaps than the Church itself, because it has the function of transmitting to new generations a culture whose roots lie in the remote past.