The time-worn file of yellowing class notes written nearly a century ago by 13-year-old Isabelle Chavannes was about to be thrown into a furnace when her great-nephew flicked through the pages. It was an educational treasure: verbatim accounts of science lessons given by the Nobel prizewinner Marie Curie.
The lessons will be at the centre of ceremonies next month to mark the centenary of the first of two Nobel prizes awarded to the Polish-born scientist for her work on radioactivity. But the tone and method recorded in the notes by Chavannes show Curie's experiments were as revolutionary for teaching as they were for science.
La coopérative d'enseignement - the teaching co-operative - was set up by Curie with a group of scientists, artists and academics. Children as young as six were given practical experience at high-school level while the morning-only lessons in a laboratory at the Sorbonne, or at private houses, finished with chocolate and croissants.
Rémi Langevin, maths professor at Bourgogne University, Isabelle's great-nephew, was helping his grandfather burn papers when he saved the notebook that had been stored in an old trunk.
'My grandfather handed the contents to me one after the other to throw in the fire and I had to make an instinctive decision on what to save and what to burn,' he said.
He made photocopies of the file, which has since circulated privately among the descendants of Marie Curie's pupils before an agreement with her granddaughter, Hélène Langevin-Jolie, herself a top scientist, to publish the lessons.
Yves Quéré, of the French Academy of Sciences, said the pages gave off an 'aston ishing feeling of freshness as if these children were the first to be taught in this style'.
When the co-operative was set up in 1907, France was involved in a national debate on popular education, split between a small elite who paid to go to high school and the mass whose learning ended at primary level. Curie, then 40 and a widow, decided to break through prejudices that did not allow girls to take the baccalauréat .
Science for girls was taboo, but Curie had been brought up in Poland where advanced education, often taught in undercover schools, was a powerful tool against Russian oppression.
Curie was so scathing about the small-mindedness of the French system that she wrote: 'I sometimes think it would be better to drown children than to lock them up in present-day schools.'
But until the release of Chavannes's notes, her pioneering efforts to break the mould had almost been forgotten, despite brief references by Eve Curie, Marie's second daughter, in a 1937 biography. The book touched on an idyllic world. About 10 children, all from friends' families, were taken out of the public system for inclusion in the co-operative.
Their teachers included another Nobel prizewinner, Jean Perrin, physicist Paul Langevin (his relationship with Marie became a national scandal), and Henri Mouton, a Pasteur Institute biologist, along with historians, linguists and artists.
The children, whose average age was 10, went to different locations each morning for lessons which were intimate and relaxed.
Chavannes, who became one of the world's first women industrial chemists, was her oldest pupil. Her notes, made up largely of first-person quotes, were as much reports intended to capture Curie's voice as a record of what was taught. The 10 lessons on elementary physics, based on the level expected of 14-year-old lycée students, reflect the scientist's astonishing simplicity and patience.
'Here is a bottle,' Madame Curie began - Isabelle noted for the first lesson on 27 January, 1907. 'It appears to be empty. What is inside? We open it.'
'Air,' all the children reply.
'How do you know if there is something inside?' Madame Curie said.
'To see if the bottle does contain air, we are going to try to put something inside, water for example.'
Page after page of neatly illustrated experiments taken during lessons up to November 1907 include practical work on density, ways to make a barometer and how to make an egg float (use salt water). Pupils were encouraged to come up with their own ideas and one incident illustrated Curie's sense of humour.
Asked for methods of keeping water hot in a pot, the children offered a series of ingenious possibilities only to be told: 'I'd begin by putting a lid on it.' She told her pupils to avoid mistakes: 'The secret was not to work too quickly.'
The only recorded expressions of anger were caused by sloppiness. 'Don't tell me you'll clear up afterwards,' she told a boy who had made a mess while making a battery. 'You must never dirty a table during an experiment.'
The press mocked practical science lessons for children 'who can barely read and write' and one paper thought the Sorbonne laboratory in the Rue Cuvier might one day go up in smoke.
'Collective teaching ended after two years,' Eve Curie wrote in 1937. 'The parents were too overstretched by their own work to give time to the enterprise.'
'Leçons de Marie Curie' is published by EDP Sciences, 250 Rue Saint-Jacques,75005 Paris. www.edpsciences.org Tel: 00 33 155 428 051.
