The École normale supérieure is a French grande école. The ENS was initially conceived during the French Revolution, and it was intended to provide the Republic with a new body of teachers, trained in the critical spirit and secular values of the Enlightenment. It has since developed into an elite institution which has become a platform for many of France's brightest young people to pursue high-level careers in government and academia. Its alumni have provided France with scores of philosophers, writers, scientists, statesmen and even churchmen. Among them are 12 Nobel Prize laureates, 10 Fields Medalists, 1 Gauss Prize laureate, and 2 recipients of the John Bates Clark Medal in Economics. For a long time, women were taught at a separate ENS. The two were merged, after some heated debate, into a single entity, with its main campus at the historic site at the rue d'Ulm in Paris. The ENS system is different from that of most higher education systems outside France, thus making it difficult to compare; in particular, it is much smaller than a typical Anglo-Saxon collegiate university. Nevertheless, ENS has been consistently ranked 18th to 33rd in the QS World University Rankings since their inception; in particular, it was ranked the best higher-education institution in Continental Europe in 2006 and 2007, and has remained among the top three in the same category since then. Wikipedia [ - ]

The École normale supérieure is a French grande école. The ENS was initially conceived during... [ + ]