Француздың атақты «École normale supérieure» мектебінің тарихы

French "grande école" (ENS Paris)
The school was founded in 1794 during the French Revolution, to provide homogeneous training of high school teachers in France, but it later closed. The school was subsequently reestablished by Napoleon I as pensionnat normal from 1808 to 1822, before being recreated in 1826 and taking the name of École normale in 1830. When institutes for primary teachers training called écoles normales were created in 1845, the word supérieure (meaning upper) was added to form the current name. In 1936, the institution started providing university level education. As a grande école, the vast majority of the academic staff hosted at the ENS belong to external institutions such as one of the Parisian universities, the CNRS and the EHESS. Generalistic in its recruitment and organisation, the ENS is the only grande école in France to have departments of research in all the natural, social, and human sciences. Its alumni include 14 Nobel Prize laureates, of which 8 are in Physics, 12 Fields Medalists, more than half the recipients of the CNRS's Gold Medal, several hundred members of the Institut de France, as well as several French and foreign politicians and statespeople.

The current institution finds its roots in the creation of the École normale de l'an III by the post revolutionary National Convention led by Robespierre in 1794. The school was created based on a recommendation by Joseph Lakanal and Dominique Joseph Garat, who were part of the commission on public education. The École normale was intended as the core of a planned centralised national education system. The project was also conceived as a way to reestablish trust between the Republic and the country's elites, which had been alienated to some degree by the Reign of Terror. The decree establishing the school, issued on 30 October 1794 (9 brumaire an III), states in its first article that "There will be established in Paris an École normale (literally, a normal school), where, from all the parts of the Republic, citizens already educated in the useful sciences shall be called upon to learn, from the best professors in all the disciplines, the art of teaching." The inaugural course was given on 20 January 1795 and the last on 19 May of the same year at the Museum of Natural History. The goal of these courses was to train a body of teachers for all the secondary schools in the country and thereby to ensure a homogenous education for all. These courses covered all the existing sciences and humanities and were given by scholars such as: scientists Monge, Vandermonde, Daubenton, Berthollet and philosophers Bernardin de Saint Pierre and Volney were some of the teachers. The school was closed as a result of the arrival of the French Directory but this École normale was to serve as a basis when the school was founded for the second time by Napoleon I in 1808. On 17 March 1808, Napoleon created by decree a pensionnat normal within the imperial University of France charged with "training in the art of teaching the sciences and the humanities". The establishment was opened in 1810, its strict code including a mandatory uniform. By then a sister establishment had been created by Napoleon in Pisa under the name of Scuola normale superiore (SNS), which continues to exist today and still has close ties to the Paris school. Up to 1818, the students are handpicked by the academy inspectors based on their results in the secondary school. However, the "pensionnat" created by Napoleon came to be perceived under the Restoration as a nexus of liberal thought and was suppressed by then minister of public instruction Denis Luc Frayssinous in 1824.

An École préparatoire was created on 9 March 1826 at the site of collège Louis le Grand. This date can be taken as the definitive date of creation of the current school. After the July Revolution, the school regained its original name of École normale and in 1845 was renamed École normale supérieure. During the 1830s, under the direction of philosopher Victor Cousin, the school enhanced its status as an institution to prepare the agrégation by expanding the duration of study to three years, and was divided into its present day "Sciences" and "Letters" divisions. In 1847 the school moved into its current quarters at the rue d'Ulm, next to the Panthéon in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. This helped it gain some stability, which was further established under the direction of Louis Pasteur. Having been recognised as a success, a second school was created on its model at Sèvres for girls in 1881, followed by other schools at Fontenay, Saint Cloud (both of which later moved to Lyon, and Cachan). The school's status evolved further at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1903 it was integrated into the University of Paris as a separate college, perhaps as a result of its exposure to national attention during the Dreyfus Affair, in which its librarian Lucien Herr and his disciples, who included the socialist politician Jean Jaurès and the writers Charles Péguy and Romain Rolland spearheaded the campaign to overturn the wrongful conviction pronounced against Captain Alfred Dreyfus. The first female student – Marguerite Rouvière – was accepted in 1910, which made headline news in France and polarised opinion. The ranks of the school were significantly reduced during the First World War, but the 1920s marked a degree of expansion of the school, which had among its students at this time such figures as Raymond Aron, Jean Paul Sartre, Vladimir Jankélévitch and Maurice Merleau Ponty. The high sacrifice paid by normaliens in the First World War was recognized by the award of the croix de guerre avec citation à l ordre de l armée in 1925.

After the Second World War, in which some of its students were players in the Resistance, the school became more visible and increasingly perceived as a bastion of the communist left. Many of its students belonged to the French Communist Party. This leftist tradition continued into the 1960s and 1970s during which an important fraction of French Maoists came from ENS. In 1953 it was made autonomous from the University of Paris, but it was perceived ambivalently by the authorities as a nexus of protest, particularly due to the teachings delivered there by such controversial figures as political philosopher Louis Althusser. As of now, by law, ENS comes under the direct authority of the Minister for Higher Education and Research. The fallout from the May 1968 protests caused President of the Republic Georges Pompidou, himself a former student at the school, to force the resignation of its director, Robert Flacelière and to appoint his contemporary Jean Bousquet as his successor Both Flacelière and Bousquet were distinguished classicists. The school continued to expand and include new subjects, seeking to cover all the disciplines of natural and social sciences. In this manner, a new concours was opened in 1982 to reinforce the teaching of social sciences at the school. and classicist Jacqueline de Romilly. In 1985, after heated debates, the two were merged into a single entity with its main campus at the historic site at the rue d'Ulm in Paris.

École normale supérieure is a Grande école, a French institution of higher education that is separate from, but parallel and connected to the main framework of the French public university system. Similar to the Ivy League in the United States, Oxbridge in the UK, and C9 League in China, Grandes Écoles are elite academic institutions that admit students through an extremely competitive process. Grandes Écoles typically have much smaller class sizes and student bodies than public universities in France, and many of their programs are taught in English, and while most are more expensive than French universities, École normale supérieure charges the same tuition fees: for 2021/2022, they were €243 to register for the master's degree. International internships, study abroad opportunities, and close ties with government and the corporate world are a hallmark of the Grandes Écoles. Degrees from École normale supérieure are accredited by the Conférence des Grandes Écoles and awarded by the Ministry of National Education (France) Alums go on to occupy elite positions within government, administration, and corporate firms in France.

The École normale supérieure is one of a few schools that still occupy a campus in the heart of Paris. The historic Paris ENS campus is located around the rue d'Ulm, the main building being at 45 rue d'Ulm in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, which was built by architect Alphonse de Gisors and given to ENS by law in 1841. Above the entrance door are sculptures of two female figures who respectively represent letters and sciences. They are portrayed sitting on either side of a medallion of Minerva, who represents wisdom. A formalised version of this frontal piece is used as the school's emblem. The main site at 45 rue d'Ulm is organized around a central courtyard, the Cour aux Ernests. Another courtyard south of this one, the Cour Pasteur, separates the school from the apartment buildings of the rue Claude Bernard. These buildings house the administrative functions of the school, and some of its literary departments (philosophy, literature, classics and archeology), its mathematics and computer science departments, as well as its main human sciences library. The site's monument aux morts, which was inaugurated in 1923 and stands as a reminder of the normaliens who died in the First World War, is a work by Paul Landowski. Several auxiliary buildings surround this main campus in adjacent streets. The closest one, opposite the main entrance, at 46 rue d'Ulm, houses the school's biology department and laboratories as well as a part of its student residences. The seat of the school's physics and chemistry departments, inaugurated in 1936 by Léon Blum and Albert Lebrun, lies north of the school on rue Lhomond, while further up the rue d'Ulm its number 29 houses secondary libraries and the school's department of cognitive sciences. ENS has a second campus on Boulevard Jourdan (previously the women's college), in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, which is home to the school's research department of social sciences, law, economics and geography, as well as further student residences. The site has been undergoing major reconstruction since 2015. In 2017, President Francois Hollande inaugurated a new building on site, which is home to the ENS economics department, the school's social science library, and the Paris School of Economics, an ENS project. The school has a secondary site in the suburb of Montrouge, which houses some of its laboratories alongside those of Paris Descartes University. It features green areas and sporting facilities as well as some 200 student rooms. A fourth site in the town of Villejuif, south of Paris, hosts some of the school's biology laboratories.

The school is very small in student numbers. Its core of students, who are called normaliens, are selected via a competitive exam called a concours (baccalaureate + 2 years) after a preparatory class. Two hundred normaliens are thus recruited every year, half of them in the sciences and the same number in the humanities, and receive a monthly salary (around €1,350/month in 2018), and in exchange they sign a ten year contract to work for the state. Although it is seldom applied in practice, this exclusivity clause is redeemable (often by the hiring firm). A small part of the students are admitted without having to pass an exam. Preparation for the concours takes place in preparatory classes which last two years (see grandes écoles). Other students called "normaliens étudiants" can be selected but they do not have their study paid. They are selected with the preparation of a research project (baccalaureate + 2–4 years). PhD students at ENS are either graduate students from the ENS doctoral school or from another doctoral school co accredited by ENS. Since 2016 PhD students preparing their doctoral research at ENS are awarded a PhD from PSL University. ENS also welcomes selected foreign students (the "international selection"), participates in various graduate programs, and has extensive research laboratories. The foreign students selected often receive a scholarship which covers their expenses. The students selected via the concours remain at the school for a length of time ranging from four to six years. Normaliens from France and other European Union countries are considered civil servants in training. Many students devote at least one of those years to the agrégation, which allows them to teach in high schools or universities. Faculty recruitment is selective, with between zero and one ENS professorship open per year. Faculty recruitments usually happen upon previous incumbent retirements. In informal ENS jargon, ENS full professors are popularly called PdPs ("professeurs des professeurs)" because traditionally ENS was created to educate future professors.

Founded to train high school teachers through the agrégation, ENS is now an institution training researchers, professors, high level civil servants, and business and political leaders. It focuses on the association of training and research, with an emphasis on freedom of curriculum. The school's resources are equally divided between its "Letters" (social and human sciences and literature) and its "Sciences" (natural sciences and mathematics) sections. The school's fifteen departments and its thirty five units of research (unités mixtes de recherches or UMR in French) work in close coordination with other public French research institutions such as the CNRS. The school has seven departments in its "Sciences" section: mathematics; physics; computer science; chemistry; biology; geoscience; and cognitive science. It also has eight departments in its "Letters" section: philosophy; literature; history; classics; social science; economics (this section is the base of Paris School of Economics); geography; and art history and theory. In addition to these fifteen departments, a language laboratory for non specialists offers courses in most major world languages to all the students. Additional centres of research and laboratories gravitate around the departments, which function as nodes of research. The emphasis is placed squarely on interdisciplinarity. Students who entered from a scientific concours (thus having mainly studied in their preparatory school maths, physics, and chemistry or biology) are encouraged to attend courses in the literary departments. Conversely, maths and physics introductory courses are on offer for the students from the "literary" departments. The school's diploma, instituted in 2006, requires students to attend a certain number of courses not related to their major.