French school

“ Those who do attend school are taught to read and write, geography, French history, and a little arithmetic. They usually leave their studies at fourteen and remember nothing a few years after, except the reading and writing. Those who stay on can develop their studies until they reach a standard which permits them to go up for the local examination enabling them to get small scholarships in secondary schools or at Lycées. Those who do very well are educated free at the École Normale, and on leaving [131] are posted as teachers in the French schools. ”

“ This Law forms the foundations upon which the French system of national elementary education has been developed, as the Napoleonic Law of 1802 and the Decree of 1808 have formed the basis for secondary education and French state administrative organization. A primary school was to be established in every commune, which was to provide the building, pay a fixed minimum salary to the teacher, and where able maintain the school. ”

“ Indeed, those who come to a French school for instruction ought previously to have acquired a considerable knowledge of the French language, otherwise they will lose a great deal of time, for the course of instruction is adapted to natives and not to foreigners; and in these large establishments they will not change their ordinary course for one or two strangers. ”

“ In no country of Europe was education better understood than it then was in France. Francis I., who remodelled, upon a magnificent scale, the University of Paris, only followed the example which had already been set him by Louis XII. The youth of all countries flocked to the French schools. The liberal principles which induced the government to maintain, at its own expense, professors, who lectured to as many students as chose to hear them, was amply repaid by the beneficial consequences arising from the great influx of strangers. ”

“ In order that the school of a particular city or country may take its place among the general schools, it is necessary, in my opinion, that it shall have produced a great many masters celebrated for their merit, and that these shall have in their style and manner something common to them all, which particularly characterizes them, and which is sufficiently remarkable to distinguish their school from all others. Upon this principle, I reckon eight schools in all; and these are, the Florentine or Tuscan, the Roman, the Lombard, the Venetian, the Flemish, the Dutch, the French, and the German. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The so-called "Grandes Ecoles" which exist today and which continue to form the French administrative, commercial and scientific elite. They cannot be done away with since the French universities have become accessible for an ever increasing number of students since nearly 50% of the population pass their "bac" or final high school exam. The level of this exam has decreased year after year and only the preparatory schools for the Grande Ecoles continue to insist on verifying diligence and attention. ”

“ The old method of learning French, with a bonne in the nursery first, and then a severely academic governess or tutor, produced French of unsurpassed quality-But it belonged to home education, it required a great deal of leisure, it did not adapt itself to school curricula in which each child, to use the expressive American phrase, "carries" so many subjects that the hours and minutes for each have to be jealously counted out. ”

“ The French college or lycée is quite the opposite. It operates against the true spirit of the school, and has done so for eighty years being an enterprise of the State, a local extension of a central enterprise, one of the hundred branches of the great State university trunk, possessing no roots of its own and with a directing or teaching staff composed of functionaries similar to others, that is to say transferable,6353 restless and preoccupied with promotion, their principal motive for doing well being the hope of a higher rank and of getting a better situation. ”

“ The students on the scientific side of the Paris school, in spite of the fact that their studies and researches are looked after by fourteen professors entitled Maîtres de Conférences, attend certain of the courses at the Sorbonne and the Collége de France, and this is one of the reasons why many of the men and researches which have enriched French science hail from the École Normale. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nevertheless, those different sciences, even natural history, and the curative art, taught with so much perfection in private establishments, have hence derived great advantages, and here it is that public instruction comes at once to be resumed, investigated, and extended.
The present government appears to be perfectly sensible of the importance of such an establishment. The enlightened men, the celebrated savans, who approach it, have pointed out in the Collège de France a normal school, completely formed, and which unites to the extent of its object the ever-powerful ascendant of seniority. ”

“ Instead of preparing men for life French schools solely prepare them to occupy public functions, in which success can be attained without any necessity for self-direction or the exhibition of the least glimmer of personal initiative. ”

“ The people’s schools are quite separate from the secondary schools. Three types of secondary institutions have developed,—the ‘gymnasium,’ with the classics as staples; the ‘real-school,’ with modern languages and sciences; and the ‘real-gymnasium,’ with its compromise between the other two. The universities have likewise been emancipated from ecclesiastical control.
In France, a highly centralized system has been developed. Napoleon united secondary and higher education in a single corporation; under Louis Philippe, an organization of elementary schools was made ”

“ One virtue it would have, apart from those already noted, is the variation it would permit in curricula, text books, personnel and scholastic life as between one school and another. There is no more fatal error in education than that standardization which has recently become a fad and which finds its most mechanistic manifestation in France. ”

“ The right to confer degrees has been given back to the State alone; the privilege of the 'letter of obedience' has been abolished; religious teaching has been excluded from the primary schools; and after having 'laicized,' as the French phrase is, the curriculum, the effort was persistently made to 'laicize' the staff. .... From the University point of view, the territory of France is divided into seventeen academies, the chief towns of which are Paris, Douai, Caen, Rennes, Poitiers, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier, Aix, Grenoble, Chambéry, Lyons, Besançon, Nancy, Dijon, Clermont, and Algiers. ”

“ Lycées, or institutions of still higher learning, at nine places in France; and a National Society of Sciences and Arts to crown the educational system at Paris. The national system of education he proposed was to be equally open to women, as well as men, and to be gratuitous throughout. Teachers for each grade of school were to be prepared in the school next above. Sunday lectures for workingmen and peasants were to be given by teachers everywhere. Public morality, political intelligence, human progress, and the preservation of liberty and equality were the aims of the instruction. ”

“ During the period of reaction, from 1848 to 1870, the normal school did not prosper in France, but since 1870 a normal school to train elementary teachers has been established for men and one for women in each of the eighty-seven departments into which France, for administrative purposes, has been divided. Satisfactory provision has also been made for the training of teachers for the secondary schools. ”

“ 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 future masters for the different lyceums and colleges are all educated in a special school known as the École Normale, founded under the First Republic, and where, according to the government order calling it into existence, the students have not only to receive instruction, but to be taught the art of imparting it. ”

“ The rapid spread of his philosophy in France is due not only to its intrinsic value and the eloquence with which he presents it, but in part also to his having been a teacher of teachers. By his twenty years' work in the secondary schools or lycées of the provinces and Paris, and in the Superior Normal School, he has molded the thought of thousands of young men who are now teaching and writing and ruling in France. ”

“ The earth is covered with their Latin colleges; and wherever they have been able, they have put their hands on the institutions for university education; but in no instance have they founded a primary school. Even in their establishment for secondary instruction, they entrust the lower classes to teachers who do not belong to their order, and reserve to themselves the direction of the higher classes. ”

“ Whatever system France may have had before the Revolution went down in the cataclysm that destroyed the ancient regime, so that the educational system of France also dates from the Napoleonic period. In the United States, while the seeds of the public school system may have been planted in the eighteenth, or perhaps even in the seventeenth century, it has only been in the nineteenth century, with the development of the country, that our public school system has grown into what we now see; while in England, the system of national education, in a democratic sense, must be dated from 1870. ”

“ France, being a more advanced democracy than England, has made greater efforts to bring secondary education within the reach of many, and the consequence is that such education, in that country, having ceased to be a mark of class, confers very little social position. The majority of French boys who learn Latin do it simply as a matter of business, the bachelor’s degree being necessary to every physician and surgeon, to every barrister and notary, and even to every teacher of modern languages in the public schools. ”

“ Not being bound up with the colleges, as the earlier Latin grammar schools had largely been, the academies became primarily independent institutions, taking pupils who had completed the English education of the common school and giving them an advanced education in modern languages, the sciences, mathematics, history, and the more useful subjects of the time, with a view to "rounding out" their studies and preparing them for business life and the rising professions. ”

“ But while it would be madness to abolish such an institution as our normal school, and undesirable if not impossible to graft it on the new university, our school, like its elder sister in Paris, should be enabled to gain by each increase in the teaching power of the university. ”

“ Yet, when we come to compare our school programmes with those of other nations, we not only find that we do not do as much school work, nor as satisfactory work, but that what we do is done in an antiquated and unscientific manner. In France, for example, we find a school system that in its superior primary course gives to the child of the humblest artisan not only a solid foundation in all essentials of mother-tongue instruction, but, by means of its complementary courses, in manual training and modern languages as well. ”

“ Those who would try to define the secondary education of this country, will not succeed, or, if they do survive and reach the other shore, will emerge from their Odyssey as exhausted as the much-travelled and much-troubled Ulysses. The French, very logically, have their primary, secondary, and tertiary, education ”

“ They have ranged themselves into four classes; the first is devoted to the improvement of natural philosophy, chemistry and mathematics, and is denominated the "Academy of Sciences;" the second makes the language and literature of France its care, and is called the "French Academy;" the third applies itself to history and ancient learning, and bears the title of the "Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres," and the fourth, the "Academy of the Fine Arts," is employed on music, painting, sculpture and architecture. ”

“ In addition to the educational work done by the state, communes and private individuals, there exist in France a good many societies which disseminate instruction by giving courses of lectures and holding classes both for children and adults. Examples of such bodies are the Society for Elementary Instruction, the Polytechnic Association, the Philotechnic Association and the French Union of the Young at Paris; the Philomathic Society of Bordeaux; the Popular Education Society at Havre; the Rhône Society of Professional Instruction at Lyons ”