Although the overall tendency was for the workers to slip into the demand for equality within the existing educational system, as was true elsewhere, the Proudhonian influence as well as the vitality and importance of the artisan sector in which it flourished helped to keep alive the alternative tradition in France emphasizing both "self-education" and maternal domestic education. This is reflected, for example in the plan presented by Emil Aubry of the Rouennais chapter of the International at its meeting in 1869. His emphasis was on the educative role of the mother (who was, in fact, assigned the task of teaching her children how to read and write), on the necessity of openness of the school system to parental influence and parental visits, and on the undermining of monopolistic claims by the state. Similarly, a critique in the working-class newspaper La Réforme Sociale of the reform program of the radical bourgeois deputies to the Legislative Assembly also reflected this distrust of simply allocating to the state the role of educator. "Free and obligatory schooling," wrote the editor Rilbourg, "if it became an institution, would only produce unsatisfactory results. The people, if it wants to liberate itself, must organize its own education, it must not rely either upon bourgeois parliamentarians or religious congregations."

— Schooling in Western Europe by Mary Jo Maynes (Page 113)