In the early 9th century, the emperor Charlemagne mandated all churches to give lessons in reading, writing and basic arithmetic to their parishes, and cathedrals to give a higher-education in the finer arts of language, physics, music, and theology; at that time, Paris was already one of France's major cathedral towns and beginning its rise to fame as a scholastic centre. By the early 13th century, the Île de la Cité Notre-Dame cathedral school had many famous teachers, and the controversial teachings of some of these led to the creation of a separate Left-Bank Sainte-Genevieve University that would become the centre of Paris's scholastic Latin Quarter best represented by the Sorbonne university.
Twelve centuries later, education in Paris and the Paris region (Île-de-France région) employs approximately 330,000 people, 170,000 of whom are teachers and professors teaching approximately 2.9 million children and students in around 9,000 primary, secondary, and higher education schools and institutions.
Primary and secondary education
Paris is home to several of France's most prestigious high-schools such as Lycée saint Louis de Gonzague (the best high school in France), Lycée Stanislas, Lycée Louis-le-Grand and Lycée Henri-IV. Other high-schools of international renown in the Paris area include the Lycée International de Saint Germain-en-Laye and the École Active Bilingue Jeannine Manuel.
The Kingsworth International School along with the International School of Paris, are within the city. The Internationale Deutsche Schule Paris, the American School of Paris, the British School of Paris, the German international school and École Japonaise de Paris, along with the Japanese international school are located in nearby suburbs.
Higher-education
In the academic year 2004–2005, the Paris Region's 17 public universities, with its 359,749 registered students, comprised the largest concentration of university students in Europe. The Paris Region's prestigious grandes écoles and scores of university-independent private and public schools have an additional 240,778 registered students, that, together with the university population, creates a grand total of 600,527 students in higher education that year.
Universities
The cathedral of Notre-Dame was the first centre of higher-education before the creation of the University of Paris, Le Sorbonne, which was founded in about 1150. The universitas was chartered by King Philip Augustus in 1200, as a corporation granting teachers (and their students) the right to rule themselves independently from crown law and taxes. At the time, many classes were held in open air. Non-Parisian students and teachers would stay in hostels, or "colleges", created for the boursiers coming from afar.
Already famous by the 13th century, the University of Paris had students from all of Europe. Paris's Rive Gauche scholastic centre, dubbed "Latin Quarter" as classes were taught in Latin then, would eventually regroup around the college created by Robert de Sorbon from 1257, the Collège de Sorbonne. The University of Paris in the 19th century had six faculties: law, science, medicine, pharmaceutical studies, literature, and theology. Following the 1968 student riots, there was an extensive reform of the University of Paris, in an effort to disperse the centralised student body. The following year, the former unique University of Paris was split between thirteen autonomous universities located throughout the city of Paris and its suburbs. Each of these universities inherited only some of the departments of the old University of Paris, and are not generalist universities. Panthéon-Assas University, Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Paris-Descartes University and Paris-Nanterre University inherited the law faculty; Paris Descartes University, Paris-Diderot University and Pierre-and-Marie-Curie University inherited the medicine faculty, and the latter two inherited the scientific departments; Paris-Sorbonne University and Sorbonne Nouvelle inherited the arts and humanities.
In 1991, four more universities were created in the suburbs of Paris, reaching a total of seventeen public universities for the Paris (Île-de-France) région. These new universities were given names (based on the name of the suburb in which they are located) and not numbers like the previous thirteen: University of Cergy-Pontoise, University of Évry Val d'Essonne, University of Marne-la-Vallée, École supérieure Robert De Sorbon and University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines.
Students also have the opportunity to study abroad in North America via the MICEFA program.