The function of training the future teachers for secondary education was reserved for the École normale supérieure. Now at this epoch it was an admitted principle that to be a good secondary teacher it is necessary for a man to know, and sufficient to know perfectly, the subject he is charged to teach. The one is certainly necessary, but the other is not sufficient: knowledge of a different, of a higher, order is no less indispensable than the regular "scholastic" equipment. At the École there was never any question of such higher knowledge, but, in accordance with the prevailing theory, preparation was made for secondary teaching simply by imparting it. However, as the École normale has always been excellently recruited, the system in vogue has not prevented it from numbering among its former pupils men of the first order, not only as professors, thinkers, or writers, but even as critical scholars. But it must be recognised that they made their way for themselves, in spite of the system, not thanks to it, after, not during, their pupilage, and principally when they had the advantage, during a stay at the French School at Athens, of the wholesome contact with documents which they had not enjoyed at the Rue d'Ulm. "Does it not seem strange," it has been said, "that so many generations of professors should have been turned out by the École normale incapable of utilising documents?... Formerly, in short, students of history, on leaving the École, were not prepared either to teach history, which they had learned in a great hurry, or to investigate difficult questions."[245] As for the École des chartes, which was founded under the Restoration, it was, from a certain point of view, a special school like the others, designed in theory to train those useful functionaries, archivists and librarians. But professional instruction was early reduced to a strict minimum, and the École des chartes was organised on a very original plan, with a view to provide a rational and complete apprenticeship for the young men who proposed to study mediæval French history. The pupils of the École des chartes did not follow any course of "mediæval history," but they learnt all that is necessary for doing work on the solution of the still open questions of mediæval history. Here alone, in virtue of an accidental anomaly, the subjects which are preliminary and auxiliary to historical research were systematically taught. We have already had occasion to note the effects of this circumstance.[246]