After the Franco-Prussian War, Republicans further promoted the modernization reform of middle school curriculum, and the four-year school was renamed as "Modern Middle School", which strengthened the teaching of modern language, history, geography and physical education, and correspondingly reduced the teaching hours of classical languages. During this period, women's secondary education in France also made great progress. National girls' middle schools and municipal girls' middle schools have been established one after another, mainly engaged in home economics, health, handicrafts, music and picture education.
In the first half of the 20th century, the reform of secondary education in France was mainly devoted to solving two major problems, one was to solve the dispute between literature and substance in the curriculum of secondary schools, and the other was to realize the transition from the dual-track system to the ladder system. 1902 the reform of secondary education emphasizes the importance of learning French and modern natural science knowledge, and holds that French, modern natural science knowledge and classical language have the same value. However, this change has not been fully realized. After 1923 took charge of the Ministry of Public Education, Behach, who pursued the classical education thought, put forward that the curriculum has its intrinsic value and should not change with the changes of social environment and social needs, and advocated that middle school is an important place to teach the essence of French cultural traditions-writing and literature education with Latin and Greek as the core. This idea was realized in the educational reform decree signed by French President 1923 in May. At the end of 1923, the French Ministry of Education promulgated the curriculum of national and municipal secondary schools based on the restoration of classical languages.
In order to realize the reform from the dual-track system to the ladder system,1In July, 926, when Elio was the Minister of Education, he carried out the reform of free secondary education, unifying the contents of the same subject in the curriculum plans of senior primary schools, municipal middle schools and ethnic middle schools. Later, in the financial law promulgated by the government in 1927, it was stipulated that men and women enjoyed equal right to education. During the period of 1937, radical journalist and lawyer Jean Zahi submitted an unsuccessful educational reform plan to Parliament, changing the dual-track system into a ladder system and advocating that middle schools should also be included in the unified school. The task of democratization of secondary education needs to be further solved.