But schools were regarded as more than institutions for the moral improvement of the people. Utilitarians assigned specific social functions to them as well. Harvey Chisick's social history of the French philosophes' ideas about education establishes the main areas of agreement among the advanced thinkers of the day. These shared assumptions reveal much about the society that produced these thinkers and, as Chisick argues so well, that ultimately limited their concrete policies and their very ideas themselves.

Chisick carefully analyzes the proposals on education that appeared in increasing numbers in France beginning around 1760. These proposals, despite their faith in the power of education to improve human potential, were, Chisick argues, all in the end limited by an underlying belief that proper early socialization would always have to help maintain social stability and the social hierarchy in a situation of scarcity. The proposals about popular education nearly all assumed that the chasm which divided "the people" from their social and political superiors would remain. Indeed, for many of these writers—themselves products of and linked to the propertied classes—one of the prime functions of education was precisely to assure that each individual had the skills and the frame of mind appropriate to his or her station in life. "To make the people love its lot. That is the true goal of the education of the people," was the way that the philosophe Philippe de Madeleine put it. And Chisick argues that de Madeleine's views, if somewhat baldly stated, were nonetheless typical of his milieu. The implication, of course, was that even if the early training of people was to be encouraged, that training had to be limited so as not to kindle undue aspirations.

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 43)