Collège de France

“ Many of them are of wealthy families, but many others live on scholarships. The whole organization may be considered as democratic. A few students are foreigners, and we have met some French students very well pleased with the college life and the studies.
Every college takes four years of study with examinations from time to time. Some students afterwards do personal work, and acquire the degree of Doctor, which does not exactly correspond to the same title in France. The colleges have laboratories with many good facilities for experimentation. ”

“ The College, being the most celebrated centre of education in France, is recruited from several provinces and even from our colonies, so that the distance at which families live does not permit of parents' seeing their children. As a rule, pupils do not spend the long holidays at home, and remain at the College continuously until their studies are terminated. ”

“ Any foreigner can attend the course of lectures of the most celebrated men in France, and indeed in the world, for nothing. The law students number about three thousand; those studying medicine about three thousand; and those studying the sciences about fifteen hundred. Foreign students are admitted upon the same terms as French, and a diploma given by an American college, if it be of high repute, will put the student upon the same footing as a French bachelier et lettres when the object is to study law or medicine. ”

“ During the seventeenth [Pg 106] and eighteenth centuries, the erudition of its teachers, their excellent method and admirable discipline, made it the premier college of Paris and in the heyday of its fame five hundred scholars crowded its halls, among them the scions of the nobility of France. Towards the end of the eighteenth century the university had its seat in the college and concentrated there the endowments, or such as had escaped spoliation, of twenty-six suppressed colleges. The college of Louis le Grand and nine others of the multitude that clustered around the hill of St. ”

“ As I read in this new-found book of the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, and pored over the engraved views of quadrangles, halls, libraries, chapels,—of all the noble and dignified belongings of a great seat of learning, —my heart sank within me. Every feature of the little American college seemed all the more sordid. ”

“ With the library, the laboratories and the academic buildings of the university, with the beauty of its architecture, the charm of the open country, the academic and national traditions of the place, the infant college is surely endowed by the fairies with all ideal gifts. ”

“ Andrews that the traditional distinctions between the College and the University are maintained, that there is the solemn stillness which befits an ancient seat of learning, that every step brings one in view of some monument of ages that are past and gone, and that we are reminded not only of the learning of our ancestors, of their piety and devotion to the College they built and endowed, but of the secular history of our country as well. ”

“ They represent the college. They are the college. It is not in the campus with its imposing halls and temples, nor in the silent lore of the vast library or the scientific instruments of well-equipped laboratories, but in the men who are the incarnation of all these, that your college lives. ”

“ The French and German, and for that matter the English, too, in most of our colleges, are mere child's play, where they are not broad and ridiculous farces, the butt of students and professors alike. Let some of our colleges inaugurate the reform: lay out a "modern" course for admission and for college on the same general principle as the classical course—few subjects, but long-continued and detailed study in each of them—and insist on as thorough and vigorous work as they do in their Latin and Greek, and then, after a fair trial, compare results. ”

“ The society of persons engaged in the pursuits of literature, including the officers and students. Societies of this kind are incorporated, and endowed with revenues.
"A college, in the modern sense of that word, was an institution which arose within a university, probably within that of Paris or of Oxford first, being intended either as a kind of boarding-school, or for the support of scholars destitute of means, who were here to live under particular supervision. ”

“ The American colleges have held fast to the best of the ancient learning and utilized the best experiences and ideas of the English, German and French systems of education, and mapped out a distinctive system for themselves. They have sought to meet the needs of our age and the requirements of our generation, and we have as a product the modern American college, adapted to the wants of the people and the formation of a strong national character. ”

“ While many of the members of the faculty do, and may continue to, give courses in the other colleges, they have a distinct, organic connection with the teachers college. The teachers college is also getting to have, as a vital part of its equipment, a model high school bearing to it the same relationship that the model, or practise, school bears to our normal schools. ”

“ Let us suppose the revolution which we have traced in the sophomore, junior, and senior years to have reached its natural terminus; let us suppose that in these years all studies have become elective, while the freshman year remains completely prescribed; the college will then fall into two parts, a preparatory department and a university department. In these two departments the character of the instruction, the methods of study, the consciousness of the students, will be altogether dissimilar. The freshmen will not be taken by upper classmen as companions ”

“ The college provides for this by its surroundings—the old buildings, the old elms, the old campus, the class songs, the memorial days, the pleasant memories, the struggles and rivalries in recitation, the sports, the diploma, the honor, the prestige in the world outside, the relative standing of “our” college and the other colleges. All these things create in the student the esprit du corps which makes him glad to say, “I belong to this or that college.” See the working of this spirit in a college boat-race. ”

“ Indeed, most of our Protestant and Catholic colleges, too, accord the diploma to all their students, irrespective of their merits. We ourselves have been called upon, by a graduate of one of the oldest and most respectable Protestant colleges in the country, to translate his diploma into English, that the old folks at home might know what it meant. We need to raise our own colleges to a higher standard than they now possess, and to offer to our men of talent the means of completing the imperfect education of an ordinary college course. ”

“ The old New England college: the representative college of olden days, injected a love of books and the wisdom of books in their students: reams of the classic poets and prose writers: encyclopædic furnishings of the mind with the contents of a few good, stimulating books. Those were the hey-days of pure scholarship. They have existed here: but we students, today, are illustrations of an evolution in educational ideals, even if most of us [370] don’t seem to realize it. We represent the changed temper of higher education. ”

“ Training for citizenship and the preparation of the scholar are then the twofold function of the college. To furnish professional training for lawyers, doctors, ministers, engineers, librarians, is manifestly the work of the university or the technical school, and not the function of the college. Neither is it, in my opinion, the work of the college to prepare its students specifically to be teachers or even wives and husbands, mothers and fathers. ”

“ With a view to supplying teachers for the secondary schools, the state maintains the École Normale Supérieure, a college in which instruction, board and lodging are given free to a number of scholars selected by competition from the best secondary school boys, though residence in the institution is no longer compulsory. ”

“ The very conception of an academical college was no doubt largely drawn from the colleges of the regular religious Orders, which, unlike those of the Mendicants, were entirely designed as places of study. ”

“ Besides the Lycées, every school established by a municipality, or kept by an individual, which gave instruction in Latin, French, geography, history, and mathematics was designated as a secondary school, or Communal College. These institutions usually offered but a partial Lycée course, and were tuition schools, being patronized by many parents whose tastes forbade the sending of their children to the lower-class primary schools. A license from the Government to operate was necessary before masters could be employed. ”

“ In order to supply the need of a more thorough preparation, a preparatory department has been maintained in many colleges. The present aim and tendency of our educational system is to introduce the pupil from the high school to the rank of Freshman in college. ”

“ Stand. To stand out for College, verb. phr. (Westminster) .—To enter for a King’s scholarship. Candidates must be under fifteen years of age, and have been in the school as a town boy for not less than a year preceding.
1867. Collins, The Public Schools, p. 182. Then if he thinks proper he “STANDS OUT FOR COLLEGE”—or, in the old Latin phraseology, becomes one of the minores candidati. He undergoes a very severe examination, called the “Challenge” [q.v.] , the form of which must have been preserved from Queen Elizabeth’s days, and is the last surviving relic of the old scholastic disputations ”

“ Our universities assume part of the high school function along with their own. The German Gymnasium and French lycée include the equivalents of the American college Freshmen and part of the Sophomores. They finish up the drill and discipline stage of education. ”

“ By a closer union with the high schools, the colleges may help to fashion their courses, improve their methods, and may suggest the importance of placing college-educated men and women in charge of the various departments of high-school work. ”

“ Instead of the instruction in history which students receive in most other institutions, an attempt has been made in this college to give instruction in a very different manner, which it is believed will not be of less educational value than the more ordinary processes of teaching. ”

“ The whole body of the colleges, taken together, constitutes the University. All those who after residing seven years at some college, have taken the degree of Master of Arts, or a higher one, and keep their name on the college lists by a small payment, vote at the University elections for members of Parliament and all other officers, and manage its affairs. ... The colleges, at certain intervals; present such students as comply with their conditions to University authorities for matriculation, for certain examinations, and for the reception of degrees ”

“ Above all, the college was to be a place of study, in the first place of philosophy and the liberal arts, and afterwards of theology. The Rochester chronicler describes the college as established for the perpetual sustenance of students ‘in arte dialectica et theologia’ (Flores Historiarum, iii. 44) . ”

“ If students evinced no aptitude for learning they were dismissed; if only moderate progress were made, the secular duties of the college devolved upon them. It was the foundation of these colleges which organised themselves,{95} about 1200, into powerful corporations of masters and scholars (universitates magistrorum et scholiarum) that gave the university its definite character. ”

“ To continue and complete the secondary schools were instituted the lyceums; here the instruction was to be Greek and Latin, rhetoric, logic, literature, moral philosophy, and the elements of the mathematical and physical sciences. The pupils were to be of four kinds: boursiers nationaux, scholars nominated to scholarships by the State; pupils from the secondary schools, admitted as free scholars by competition; paying boarders, and paying day-scholars." M. Arnold, Schools and Universities on the Continent, chapter 1. EDUCATION: France: A. D. 1833-1889. The present System of Public Instruction. ”

“ It is curious to find in such an excluded town a school deserving the designation of a college, as it includes intermediate, primary, and normal schools, an English school with 150 pupils, organised by English and American teachers, an engineering school, a geological museum, splendidly equipped laboratories, and the newest and most approved scientific and educational apparatus. ”

“ A new college is founded every week. Today more than half of the high school graduates go on to college.
There are hundreds of thousands of fathers and mothers who never completed grammar school--who will see their children graduate from college. ”

“ If the American college is to have a part in that new educational movement which is beginning to make the school not merely a preparation for life but life itself, interested in what has meaning to the student at his particular age and situation, it will have to recast some of its most cherished practices and ideals. ”

“ After three years in the preliminary school the pupil begins his nine-year course in preparation for the university. In some of the states of the German Empire the pupil may be transferred into the Gymnasium from the earliest grades of the common school, but from this point on there is no commerce whatsoever, in teaching staff, in course of study, or in pupil constituency, between the common school and the school of the aristocracy. The division in France is quite as strict. In England transfer in the later years of the common-school course can be made, but only on the basis of examinations. ”