The Modern Regime Volume II Part 19

In the early years of the century there were thousands of secondary schools of every kind and degree, everywhere born or reborn, spontaneous, local, raised up through the mutual understanding of parents and masters, and, consequently, subject to this understanding, diverse, flexible, dependent on the law of supply and demand, compet.i.tive, each careful to keep its own patrons, each compelled, like every other private enterprise, to adjust its working to the views and faculties of its clients. It is very probable that, if these had been allowed to exist, if the new legislator had not been radically hostile to permanent corporations, endowments, and mortmain t.i.tles; if, through the jealous intervention of his Council of State and the enormous levies of his fiscal system, the government had not discouraged free a.s.sociations and the free donations to which they might have been ent.i.tled, the best of these secondary schools would have survived: those which might have been able to adapt themselves to their surroundings would have had the most vitality; according to a well-known law, they would have prospered in branching off, each in its own sense and in its own way.--Now, at this date, after the demolitions of the Revolution, all pedagogic roads were open and, at each of their starting-points, the runners were ready, not merely the secular but, again, independent ecclesiastics, liberal Gallicans, surviving Jansenists, const.i.tutional priests, enlightened monks, some of them philosophers and half-secular in mind or even at heart, using Port-Royal manuals, Rollin's "Traite des etudes" and Condillac's "Cours d'Etudes," the best-tried and most fecund methods of instruction, all the traditions of the seventeenth century from Arnauld to Lancelot and all the novelties of the eighteenth century from Locke to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, all wide-awake or aroused by the demands of the public and by this unique opportunity and eager to do and to do well. In the provinces[6338] as at Paris, people were seeking, trying and groping. There was room and encouragement for original, sporadic and multiple invention, for schools proportionate with and suited to various and changing necessities, Latin, mathematical or mixed schools, some for theoretical science and others for practical apprenticeship, these commercial and those industrial, from the lowest standpoint of technical and rapid preparation up to the loftiest summits of speculative and prolonged study.

On this school world in the way of formation, Napoleon has riveted his uniformity, the rigorous apparatus of his university, his unique system, narrow, inflexible, applied from above. We have seen with what restrictions, with what insistence, with what convergence of means, what prohibitions, what taxes, what application of the university monopoly, and with what systematic hostility to private establishments!--In the towns, and by force, they become branches of the lycee and imitate its cla.s.ses; in this way Sainte-Barbe is allowed to subsist at Paris and, until the abolition of the monopoly, the princ.i.p.al establishments of Paris, Ma.s.sin, Jauffrey, Bellaguet, existed only on this condition, that of becoming auxiliaries, subordinates and innkeepers for lycee day-scholars; such is still the case to-day for the lycees Bossuet and Gerson. In the way of education and instruction the little that an inst.i.tution thus reduced can preserve of originality and of pedagogic virtue is of no account.--In the country, the Oratoriens who have repurchased Juilly are obliged,[6339] in order to establish a free and durable school of "Christian and national education," to turn aside the civil law which interdicts trusts and organize themselves into a "Tontine Society" and thus present their disinterested enterprise in the light of an industrial and commercial speculation, that of a lucrative and well-attended boarding school. Still at the present day similar fictions have to be resorted to for the establishment and duration of like enterprises.[6340]

Naturally, under this prohibitive regime, private establishments are born with difficulty; and afterwards, absorbed, mutilated and strangled, they find no less difficulty in keeping alive and thus degenerate, decline and succ.u.mb one by one. And yet, in 1815, not counting the 41 small seminaries with their 5000 scholars, there still remained 1,225 private schools, with 39,000 scholars, confronting the 36 lycees and 368 communal colleges which, together, had only 37,000 scholars. Of these 1,255 private schools there are only 825 in 1854, 622 in 1865, 494 in 1876, and, finally, in 1887, 302 with 20,174 scholars; on the other hand, the State establishments have 89,000 schools, and those of the Church amount to 73,000. It is only after 1850 that the decadence of secular and private inst.i.tutions is precipitated; in effect, instead of one compet.i.tor, they have two, the second as formidable as the first one, both enjoying unlimited credit, possessors of immense capital and determined to spend money without calculation, the State, on one side abstracting millions from the pockets of the taxpayers and, on the other side, the Church deriving its millions from the purses of the faithful: the struggle between isolated individuals and these two great organized powers who give instruction at a discount or gratis is too unequal.[6341]

Such is the actual and final effect of the first Napoleonic monopoly: the enterprise of the State has, by a counter-stroke, incited the enterprise of the clergy; both now complete the ruin of the others, private, different in kind and independent, which, supported wholly by family approbation, have no other object in view than to render families content. On the contrary, along with this purpose, the two survivors have another object, each its own, a superior and doctrinal object, due to its own particular interest and antagonism to the opposite interest; it is in view of this object, in view of a political or religious purpose, that each in its own domicile directs education and instruction like Napoleon, each inculcates on, or insinuates into, young minds its social and moral opinions which are clear-cut and become cutting. Now, the majority of parents, who prefer peace to war, desire that their children should entertain moderate and not bellicose opinions. They would like to see them respectful and intelligent, and nothing more.

But neither of the two rival inst.i.tutions thus limits itself; each works beyond and aside,[6342] and when the father, at the end of July,[6343]

goes for his son at the ecclesiastical college or secular inst.i.tution, he risks finding in the young man of seventeen the militant prejudices, the hasty and violent conclusions and the uncompromising rigidity of either a "lacisant" or a "clerical."

III. Internal Vices

The internal vices of the system.--Barrack or convent discipline of the boarding-school.--Number and proportions of scholars in State and Church establishments.--Starting point of the French boarding-school.--The school community viewed not as a distinct organ of the State but as a mechanism wielded by the State.--Effects of these two conceptions.--Why the boarding-school entered into and strengthened ecclesiastical establishments.--Effects of the boarding-school on the young man.--Gaps in his experience, errors of judgment, no education of his will.--The evil aggravated by the French system of special and higher schools.

Meanwhile, the innate vices of the primitive system have lasted and, and, among others, the worst of all, the internat[6344] under the discipline of barracks or convent, while the university, through its priority and supremacy, in contact with or contiguously, has communicated this discipline at first to its subordinates, and afterward to its rivals.--In 1887,[6345] in the State lycees and colleges, there are more than 39,000 boarding-schools (internes) while, in the ecclesiastic establishments, it is worse: out of 50,000 pupils there, over 27,000 are internes, to which must be added the 23,000 pupils of the small seminaries, properly so called, nearly all of them boarders; in a total of 163,000 pupils we find 89,000 internes.[6346] Thus, to secure secondary instruction, more than one-half of the youth of France undergo the internat, ecclesiastic or secular. This is peculiar to France, and is due to the way in which Napoleon, in 1806, seized on and perverted all school enterprises.[6347]

Before 1789, in France, this enterprise, although largely trammeled and impeded by the State and the Church, was not violated in principle nor perverted in essence; still at the present day, in Germany, in England, in the United States, it exists and is developed in accordance with its nature. It is admitted to be a private enterprise,[6348] the collective and spontaneous work of several a.s.sociates voluntarily bound together, old founders, actual and future benefactors, masters and parents and even scholars,[6349] each in his place and function, under a statute and according to tradition, in such a way as to continue functioning indefinitely, in order to provide, like a gas company on its own responsibility, at its own risk and expense, a provider of services for those who want it; in other terms, the school enterprise must, like any other undertaking, render acceptable what it offers thereby satisfying the needs of its clients.--Naturally, it adapts itself to these needs; its directors and those concerned do what is necessary. With hands free, and grouped around an important interest evidently for a common purpose, mutually bound and veritable a.s.sociates not only legally but in feeling, devoted to a local enterprise and local residents for many years, often even for life, they strive not to offend the profound repugnance of the young and of families. They therefore make the necessary arrangements internally and with the parents.[6350]

That is why, outside of France, the French internat, so artificial, so forced, so exaggerated, is almost unknown. In Germany, out of one hundred pupils in the gymnases, which correspond to our lycees, there are scarcely ten boarders lodged and fed in the gymnase; the rest, even when their parents do not live near by, remain day-scholars, private guests in the families that harbor them, often at a very low price and which take the place of the absent family. No boarders are found in them except in a few gymnases like Pforta and by virtue of an ancient endowment. The number, however, by virtue of the same endowment, is limited; they dine, in groups of eight or ten,[6351] at the same table with the professors lodged like themselves in the establishment, while they enjoy for a playground a vast domain of woods, fields and meadow.--The same in England, at Harrow, Eton and Rugby. Each professor, here, is keeper of a boarding-house; he has ten, twenty and thirty boys under his roof, eating at his table or at a table the head of which is some lady of the house. Thus, the youth goes from the family into the school, without painful or sudden contrast, and remains under a system of things which suits his age and which is a continuation, only enlarged, of domestic life.[6352]

The French college or lycee 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 princ.i.p.al motive for doing well being the hope of a higher rank and of getting a better situation. This almost separate them in advance from the establishment in which they labor and,[6354] besides that, they are led, pushed on, and restrained from above, each in his own particular sphere and in his limited duty. The princ.i.p.al (proviseur) is confined to his administrative position and the professor to his cla.s.s, expressly forbidden to leave it. No professor is "under any pretext to receive in his house as boarders or day-scholars more than ten pupils."[6355]

No woman is allowed to lodge inside the lycee or college walls, all,--proviseur, censor, cashier, chaplain, head-masters and a.s.sistants, fitted by art or force to each other like cog-wheels, with no deep sympathy, with no moral tie, without collective interests, a cleverly designed machine which, in general, works accurately and smoothly, but with no soul because, to have a soul, it is of prime necessity to have a living body. As a machine constructed at Paris according to a unique pattern and superposed on people and things from Perpignan to Douai and from Roch.e.l.le to Besancon, it does not adapt itself to the requirements of the public; it subjects its public to the exigencies, rigidity and uniformity of its play and structure. Now, as it acts mechanically only, through outward pressure, the human material on which it operates must be pa.s.sive, composed, not of diverse persons, but of units all alike; its pupils must be for it merely numbers and names.--Owing to this our internats, those huge stone boxes set up and isolated in each large town, those lycees parceled out to hold three hundred, four hundred, even eight hundred boarders, with immense dormitories, refectories and playgrounds, recitation-rooms full to overflowing, and, for eight or ten years, for one half of our children and youths, an anti-social unnatural system apart, strict confinement, no going out except to march in couples under the eyes of a sub-teacher who maintains order in the ranks, promiscuity and life in common, exact and minute regularity under equal discipline and constant constraint in order to eat, sleep, study, play, promenade and the rest,--in short, COMMUNISM.

From the University this system is propagated among its rivals. In conferring grades and pa.s.sing examinations, it arranges and overburdens the school program of study; hence, it incites in others what it practices at home, the over-training of youth, and a fact.i.tious, hot-house education. On the other hand, the internat is, for those who decide on that, less troublesome than the day-school;[6356] also, the more numerous the boarders in any one establishment, the less the expense; thus, in order to exist in the face of the university establishments, there must be internats and internats that are full.

Ecclesiastical establishments willingly resign themselves to all this; they are even inclined that way; the Jesuits were the first ones, under the old monarchy, who introduced cloistered and crowded boarding-houses.

In its essence, the Catholic church, like the French State, is a Roman inst.i.tution, still more exclusive and more governmental, resolved to seize, hold on to, direct and control man entirely, and, first of all, the child, head and heart, opinions and impressions, in order to stamp in him and lastingly the definitive and salutary forms which are for him the first condition of salvation. Consequently, the ecclesiastical cage is more strict in its confinement than the secular cage; if the bars are not so strong and not so rough, the grating, finer and more yielding, is more secure, closer and better maintained; they do not allow any holes or relaxation of the meshes; the precautions against worldly and family interference, against the mistakes and caprices of individual effort, are innumerable, and form a double or even triple network. For, to school discipline is added religious discipline, no less compulsory, just as rigid and more constant--daily pious exercises, ordinary devotions and extraordinary ceremonies, spiritual guidance, influence of the confessional and the example and behavior of a staff kept together around the same work by the same faith. The closer the atmosphere, the more powerful the action; the chances are that the latter will prove decisive on the child sequestered, sheltered and brought up in a retort, and that its intellect, faith and ideas, carefully cultivated, pruned and always under direction, will exactly reproduce the model aimed at.--For this reason, in 1876, 33,000 out of 46,000 pupils belonging to the 309 ecclesiastical establishments of secondary instruction, are internes,[6357] and the Catholic authorities admit that, in the 86 small seminaries, no day-scholars, no future lay persons, are necessary.

This conclusion is perhaps reasonable in relation to the 23,000 pupils of the small seminaries, and for the 10,000 pupils in the great seminaries; it is perhaps reasonable also for the future military officers formed by the State at La Fleche, Saint-Cyr, Saumur, and on the Borda.[6358] Whether future soldiers or future priests, their education fits them for the life they are to lead; what they are to become as adults, they already are as youths and children; the internat, under a convent discipline or that of the barracks, qualifies them beforehand for their profession. Since they must possess the spirit of it they must contract its habits. Having accepted the form of their pursuit they more easily accept its constraints and all the more that the constraints of the regiment will be less for the young officer who recently was at Saint-Cyr, and for the young ministrant in the rural parish who recently was in the great seminary.--It is quite the reverse for the 75,000 other internes of public or private establishments, ecclesiastic or secular, for the future engineers, doctors, architects, notaries, attorneys, advocates and other men of the law, functionaries, land-owners, chiefs and a.s.sistants in industry, agriculture and commerce. For them the internat affords precisely the opposite education required for a secular and civil career. These carry away from the prolonged internat a sufficient supply of Latin or of mathematics; but they are lacking in two acquisitions of capital import: they have been deprived of two indispensable experiences. On entering society the young man is ignorant of its two princ.i.p.al personages, man and woman, as they are and as he is about to meet them in society. He has no idea of them, or rather he has only a preconceived, arbitrary and false conception of them.--He has not dined, commonly, with a lady, head of the house, along with her daughters and often with other ladies; their tone of voice, their deportment at table, their toilette, their greater reserve, the attentions they receive, the air of politeness all around, have not impressed on his imagination the faintest lines of an exact notion; hence, there is something wanting in him in relation to how he should demean himself; he does not know how to address them, feels uncomfortable in their presence; they are strange beings to him, new, of an unknown species.--In a like situation, at table in the evening, he has never heard men conversing together: he has not gathered in the thousand bits of information which a young growing mind derives from general conversation:

* about careers in life, compet.i.tion, business, money, the domestic fireside and expenses;

* about the cost of living which should always depend on income;

* about the gain which nearly always indicates the current rates of labor and of the social subjection one undergoes;

* about the pressing, powerful, personal interests which are soon to seize him by the collar and perhaps by the throat;

* about the constant effort required the incessant calculation, the daily struggle which, in modern society, makes up the life of an ordinary man.

All means of obtaining knowledge have been denied him, the contact with living and diverse men, the images which the sensations of his eyes and ears might have stamped on his brain. These images const.i.tute the sole materials of a correct, healthy conception; through them, spontaneously and gradually, without too many deceptions or shocks, he might have figured social life to himself, such as it is, its conditions, difficulties, and its opportunities: he has neither the sentiment of it nor even a premonition. In all matters, that which we call common sense is never but an involuntary latent summary, the lasting, substantial and salutary depot left in our minds after many direct impressions.

With reference to social life, he has been deprived of all these direct impressions and the precious depot has never been formed in him.--e He has scarcely ever conversed with his professors; their talk with him has been about impersonal and abstract matters, languages, literature and mathematics. He has spoken but little with his teachers, except to contest an injunction or grumble aloud against reproof. Of real conversation, the acquisition and exchange of ideas, he has enjoyed none, except with his comrades: if, like him, all are internes, they can communicate to each other only their ignorance. If day-scholars are admitted, they are active smugglers or willing agents who bring into the house and circulate forbidden books and obscene journals, along with the filthy provocative and foul atmosphere of the streets.--Now, with excitement of this kind or in this manner, the brains of these captives, as p.u.b.erty comes on and deliverance draws near, work actively and we know in what sense[6359] and in what counter-sense, how remote from observable and positive truth, how their imagination pictures society, man and woman, under what simple and coa.r.s.e appearances, with what inadequacy and presumption, what appet.i.tes of liberated serfs and juvenile barbarians, how, as concerns women, their precocious and turbid dreams first become brutal and cynical,[6360] how, as concerns men, their unballasted and precipitous thought easily becomes chimerical and revolutionary.[6361] The downhill road is steep on the bad side, so that, to put on the brake and stop, then to remount the hill, the young man who takes the management of his life into his own hands, must know how to use his own will and persevere to the end.

But a faculty is developed only by exercise, and the French internat is the engine the most effective for hindering the exercise of this one.--The youth, from the first to the last day of his internat, has never been able to deliberate on, choose and decide what he should do at any one hour of his schooldays; except to idle away time in study-hours, and pay no attention at recitations, he could not exercise his will. Nearly every act, especially his outward att.i.tudes, postures, immobility, silence, drill and promenades in rank, is only obedience to orders. He has lived like a horse in harness, between the shafts of his cart; this cart itself, kept straight by its two wheels, must not leave the rectilinear ruts hollowed out and traced for it along the road; it is impossible for the horse to turn aside. Besides, every morning he is harnessed at the same hour, and every evening he is unharnessed at the same hour; every day, at other hours, he has to rest and take his ration of hay and oats. He has never been under the necessity of thinking about all this, nor of looking ahead or on either side; from one end of the year to the other, he has simply had to pull along guided by the bridle or urged by the whip, his princ.i.p.al motives being only of two kinds: on the one hand more or less hard guidance and urgings, and on the other hand his recalcitrance, laziness and fatigue; he has been obliged to choose between the two. For eight or ten years, his initiative is reduced to that--no other employment of his free will. The education of his free will is thus rudimentary or nonexistent.

On the strength of this our (French) system supposes that it is complete and perfect. We cast the bridle on the young man's neck and hand him over to his own government. We admit that, by extraordinary grace, the scholar has suddenly become a man; that he is capable of prescribing and following his own orders; that he has accustomed himself to weighing the near and remote consequences of his acts, of imputing them to himself, of believing himself responsible for them; that his conscience, suddenly emanc.i.p.ated, and his reason, suddenly adult, will march straight on athwart temptations and immediately recover from slips. Consequently, he is set free with an allowance in some great city; he registers himself under some Faculty and becomes one among ten thousand other students on the sidewalks of Paris.--Now, in France, there is no university police force to step in, as at Bonn or Gottingen, at Oxford or Cambridge, to watch his conduct and punish him in the domicile and in public places.

At the schools of medicine, Law, Pharmacy, Fine-Arts, Charters, and Oriental Languages, at the Sorbonne and at the ecole Centrale, his emanc.i.p.ation is sudden and complete. When he goes from secondary education to superior education he does not, as in England and in Germany, pa.s.s from restricted liberty to one less restricted, but from a monastic discipline to compete independence. In a furnished room, in the promiscuity and incognito of a common hotel, scarcely out of college, the novice of twenty years finds at hand the innumerable temptations of the streets, the taverns, the bars, public b.a.l.l.s, obscene publications, chance acquaintances, and the liaisons of the gutter. Against all this his previous education has disarmed him. Instead of creating a moral force within him, the long and strict internat has maintained moral debility. He yields to opportunity, to example; he goes with the current, he floats without a rudder, he lets himself drift. As far as hygiene, or money, or s.e.x, is concerned, his mistakes and his follies, great or small, are almost inevitable, while it is an average chance if, during his three, four or five years of full license, he does not become entirely corrupt.

IV. Cramming and Exams Compared to Apprenticeship

Another vice of the system.--Starting-point of superior instruction in France.--Subst.i.tution of special State schools for free encyclopedic universities.--Effect of this subst.i.tution.--Examinations and compet.i.tions.--Intense, forced and artificial culture.--How it reaches an extreme.

--Excess and prolongation of theoretical studies.

--Insufficiency and tardiness of practical apprenticeship.

--Comparison of this system with others, between France before 1789 and England and the United States.--Lost forces.

--Mistaken use and excessive expenditure of mental energy.-- --The entire body of youth condemned to it after 1889.

Let us now consider another effect of the primitive inst.i.tution, not less pernicious. On leaving the lycee after the philosophy cla.s.s, the system supposes that a general education is fully obtained; there is not question of a second one, ulterior and superior, that of universities.

In place of these encyclopedic universities, of which the object is free teaching and the free progress of knowledge, it establishes special State schools, separate from each other, each confined to a distinct branch, each with a view to create, verify and proclaim a useful capacity, each devoted to leading a young man along, step by step, through a series of studies and tests up to the t.i.tle or final diploma which qualifies him for his profession, a diploma that is indispensable or, at least, very useful since, without it, in many cases, one has no right to practice his profession and which, thanks to it, in all cases, enables one to enter on a career with favor and credit, in fair rank, and considerably promoted.--On entering most careers called liberal, a first diploma is exacted, that of bachelor of arts, or bachelor of sciences, sometimes both, the acquisition of which is now a serious matter for all French youth, a daily and painful preoccupation. To this end, when about sixteen, the young man works, or, rather, is worked upon. For one or two years, he submits to a forced culture, not in view of learning and of knowing, but to answer questions well at an examination, or tolerably well, and to obtain a certificate, on proof or on semblance of proof, that he has received a complete cla.s.sical education.--Next after this, at the medical or law school, during the four prescribed years, sixteen graduated inscriptions, four or five superposed examinations, two or three terminal verifications, oblige him to furnish the same proof, or semblance of proof, to verify, as each year comes round, his a.s.similation of the lessons of the year, and thus attest that, at the end of his studies, he possesses about the entire scope and diversity of knowledge to which he is restricted.

In the schools where the number of pupils is limited, this culture, carried still farther, becomes intense and constant. In the ecole Centrale and in the commercial or agronomic schools, in the Polytechnique or Normale, he is there all day and all night,--he is housed in a barracks.--And the pressure on him is twofold--the pressure of examinations and that of compet.i.tion. On entering, on leaving, and during his stay there, not only at the end of each year but every six or three months, often every six weeks, and even every fortnight, he is rated according to his compositions, exercises and interrogatories, getting so many marks for his partial value, so many for his total value and according to these figures, cla.s.sed at a certain rank among his comrades who are his rivals. To descend on the scale would be disadvantageous and humiliating; to ascend on the scale is advantageous and glorious. Driven by this motive, so strong in France, his princ.i.p.al aim is to go up or, at least, not to go down; he devotes all his energy to this; he expends none of it on either side or beyond; he allows himself no diversion, he abstains from taking any initiative; his restrained curiosity never ventures outside of the circle traced for him; he absorbs only what he is taught and in the order in which it is taught; he fills himself to the brim, but only to disgorge at the examination and not to retain and hold on to; he runs the risk of choking and when relieved, of remaining empty. Such is the regime of our Grande Ecoles. They are systematic, energetic and prolonged system of gardening; the State, the gardener-in-chief, receiving or selecting plants which it undertakes to turn out profitably, each of its kind. To this end, it separates the species, and ranges each apart on a bed of earth; and here, all day long, it digs, weeds, rakes, waters, adds one manure after another, applies its powerful heating apparatus and accelerates the growth and ripening of the fruit. On certain beds it plants are kept under gla.s.s throughout the year; in this way it maintains them in a steady, artificial atmosphere, forcing them to more largely imbibe the nutritive liquids with which it floods the ground, thus causing them to swell and become hypertrophied, so as to produce fruits or vegetables for show, and which it exposes and which bring it credit; for all these productions look well, many of them superb, while their size seems to attest their excellence; they are weighted beforehand and the official labels with which they are decorated announce the authentic weight.

During the first quarter, and even the first half, of the (19th) century, the system remained almost un.o.bjectionable; it had not yet pushed things to excess. Down to 1850 and later, all that was demanded of the young, in their examinations and compet.i.tions, was much less the extent and minutia of knowledge than proofs of intelligence and the promise of capacity: in a literary direction, the main object was to verify whether the candidate, familiar with the cla.s.sics, could write Latin correctly and French tolerably well; in the sciences, if he could, without help, accurately and promptly solve a problem; if, again unaided, he could readily and accurately to the end, state a long series of theorems and equations without divergence or faltering; in sum, the object of the test was to verify in him the presence and degree of the mathematical or literary faculty.--But, since the beginning of the century, the old subdivided sciences and the new consolidated sciences have multiplied their discoveries and, necessarily, all discoveries end in finding their way into public instruction. In Germany, for them to become installed and obtain chairs, encyclopedic universities are found, in which free teaching, pliant and many-sided, rises of itself to the level of knowledge.[6362] With us, for lack of universities, they have had only special schools[6363]; here only could a place be found for them and professors obtained. Henceforth, the peculiar character of these schools has changed: they have ceased to be strictly special and veritably professional.--Each school, being an individuality, has developed apart and on its own account; its aim has been to install and furnish under its own roof all the general, collateral, accessory and ornamental studies which, far or near, could be of service to its own pupils. No longer content with turning out competent and practical men, it has conceived a superior type, the ideal model of the engineer, physician, jurist, professor or architect. To produce this extraordinary and desirable professional, it has designed some excessively difficult impressive lectures.[6364] To be able to make use of these, it has given the young man the opportunity not only to acquire abstract, multiple, technical knowledge, and information, but also the complementary culture and lofty general ideas, which render the specialist a true savant and a man of a very broad mind.

To this end, it has appealed to the State. The State, the contractor for public instruction, the founder of every new professional chair, appoints the occupant, pays the salary and, when in funds, is not ill-disposed, for it thus gains a good reputation, an increase of granting power and a new functionary. Such is the why and wherefore, in each school, of the multiplication of professorships: schools of law, of medicine, of pharmacy, of charters, of fine arts, polytechnic, normal, central, agronomic and commercial schools, each becoming, or tending to become, a sort of university on a small scale, bringing together within its walls the totality of teachings which, if the student profits by them, renders him in his profession an accomplished personage.

Naturally, to secure attendance at these lectures, the school, in concert with the State, adds to the exigencies of its examinations, and soon, for the average of intellects and for health, the burden imposed by it becomes too heavy. Particularly, in the schools to which admission is gained only through compet.i.tions the extra load is still more burdensome, owing to the greater crowd striving to pa.s.s; there are now five, seven and even eleven candidates for one place.[6365] With this crowd, it has been found necessary to raise and multiply the barriers, urge the compet.i.tors to jump over them, and to open the door only to those who jump the highest and in the greatest number. There is no other way to make a selection among them without incurring the charge of despotism and nepotism. It is their business to have st.u.r.dy legs and make the best of them, then to submit to methodical training, to practice and train all year and for several years in succession, in order to pa.s.s the final test, without thinking of any but the barriers in front of them on the race-course at the appointed date, and which they must spring over to get ahead of their rivals.

At the present day[6366], after the complete course of cla.s.sical studies, four years in school no longer suffice for obtaining the degrees of a doctor in medicine or doctor in law. Five or six years are necessary. Two years are necessary between the baccalaureat es-lettres and the various licenses es-lettres or sciences, and from these to the corresponding aggregations two, three years, and often more. Three years of preparatory studies in mathematics and of desperate application lead the young man to the threshold of the ecole Polytechnique; after that, after two years in school and of no less sustained effort, the future engineer pa.s.ses three not less laborious years at the ecole des Ponts et Chaussees or des Mines, which amounts to eight years of professional preparation.[6367] Elsewhere, in the other schools, it is the same thing with more or less excess. Observe how days and hours are spent during this long period.[6368] The young men have attended lecture-courses, masticated and re-masticated manuals, abbreviated abridgments, learned by heart mementos and formulae, stored their memories with a vast mult.i.tude of generalities and details. Every sort of preliminary information, all the theoretical knowledge which, even indirectly, may serve them in their future profession or which is of service in neighboring professions, are cla.s.sified in their brains, ready to come forth at the first call, and, as proved by the examination, disposable at a minute; they possess them, but nothing otherwise or beyond. Their education has all tended to one side; they have undergone no practical apprenticeship. Never have they taken an active part in or lent a hand to any professional undertaking either as collaborators or a.s.sistants.

* The future professor, a new aggrege at twenty-four years of age, who issues from the ecole Normale, has not yet taught a cla.s.s, except for a fortnight in a Paris lycee.

* The future engineer who, at twenty-four or twenty-five years of age leaves the ecole Centrale, or the ecole des Ponts, or ecole des Mines, has never a.s.sisted in the working of a mine, in the heating of a blast furnace, in the piercing of a tunnel, in the laying-out of a dike, of a bridge or of a roadway. He is ignorant of the cost and has never commanded a squad of workmen.

* If the future advocate or magistrate to be has put up with being a notary's or lawyer's clerk, he will at twenty-five years of age, even if he is a doctor of law with his insignia of three "white b.a.l.l.s,"

know nothing of the business; he merely knows his codes; he has never examined pleadings, conducted a case, drawn up an act or liquidated an estate.

* From eighteen to thirty, the future architect who competes for a prix de Rome may stay in the ecole des Beaux-Arts, draw plan after plan there, and then, if he obtains the prix, pa.s.s five years at Rome, make designs without end, multiply plans and restorations on paper, and at last, at thirty-five years of age, return to Paris with the highest t.i.tles, architect of the government, and with the aspiration to erect edifices without having taken even a second or third part in the actual construction of one single house.--

None of these men so full of knowledge know their trade and each, at this late hour, is expected to act as an expert, improvising,[6369] in haste and too fast, encountering many drawbacks at his own expense and at the expense of others, along with serious risks for the first tasks he undertakes.

Before 1789, says a witness of both the ancient and the modern regime, [6370] young Frenchmen did not thus pa.s.s their early life. Instead of dancing attendance so long on the threshold of a career, they were inducted into it very early in life and at once began the race. With very light baggage and readily obtained "they entered the army at sixteen, and even fifteen years of age, at fourteen in the navy, and a little later in special branches, artillery or engineering. In the magistracy, at nineteen, the son of a conseiller-maitre in parliament was made a conseiller-adjoint without a vote until he reached twenty-five; meanwhile, he was busy, active and sometimes was made a reporter of a case. No less precocious were the admissions to the Cour des Comptes, to the Cour des Aides, to inferior jurisdictions and into the bureaus of all the financial administrations." Here, as elsewhere, if any rank in law was exacted the delay that ensured was not apparent; the Faculty examinations were only for forms sake; for a sum of money, and after a more or less grave ceremonial, a needed diploma was obtained almost without study.[6371]--Accordingly, it was not in school, but in the profession, that professional instruction was acquired; strictly speaking, the young man for six or seven years, instead of being a student was an apprentice, that is to say a working novice under several master-workmen, in their workshop, working along with them and learning by doing, which is the best way of obtaining instruction. Struggling with the difficulties of the work he at once became aware of his incompetence;[6372] he became modest and was attentive; with his masters, he kept silent, and listened, which is the only way to understand. If he was intelligent he himself discovered what he lacked; as he found this out he felt the need of supplying what he needed; he sought, set his wits to work, and made choice of the various means; freely and self-initiating he helped himself in his general or special education. If he read books, it was not resignedly and for a recitation, but with avidity and to comprehend them. If he followed lecture-courses it was not because he was obliged to, but voluntarily, because he was interested and because he profited by it.--Chancellor Pasquier was magistrate at seventeen (in 1784), attended at the lycee the lectures of Garat, La Harpe, Fourcroy and Duparcieux and, daily, at table or in the evening, listened to his father and his friends discussing matters which, in the morning, had been argued in the Palais de Justice or in the Grand-Chambre. He imbibed a taste for his profession. Along with two or three prominent advocates and other young magistrates like himself, he inscribed his name for lectures at the house of the first president of the first court of inquiry. Meanwhile, he went every evening into society; he saw there with his own eyes the ways and interests of men and women. On the other hand, at the Palais de Justice, a conseiller- ecoutant he sat for five years, alongside of the conseiller-juges and often, the reporter of a case, he gave his opinion. After such a novitiate, he was competent to form a judgment in civil or criminal cases with experience, competency and authority. From the age of twenty-five, he was prepared for and capable of serious duties. He had only to live and perfect himself to become an administrator, deputy or minister, a dignitary as we see under the first Empire, under the Restoration, under the July monarchy, that is to say the best informed, well-balanced, judicious political character and, at length, the man of highest consideration of his epoch.[6373]

Such is also the process which, still at the present day (1890), in England and in America secures future ability in the various professions. In the hospital, in the mine, in factories, with the architect, with the lawyer, the pupil, taken very young, goes through his apprenticeship and subsequent stages about the same as a clerk with us in an office or an art-student in the studio. Preliminarily and before entering it, he has attended some general seminary lecture which serves him as a ready-made basis for the observations he is about to make. Meanwhile, there are very often technical courses within reach, which he may attend at his leisure in order to give shape to his daily experiences as these happen to acc.u.mulate. Under a regime of this stamp practical capacity grows and develops of itself, just to that degree which the faculties of the pupil warrant, and in the direction which his future aims require, through the special work to which he wishes for the time being to adapt himself. In this way, in England and in the United States, the young man soon succeeds in developing all he is good for.

From the age of twenty-five and much sooner, if the substance and bottom are not wanting, he is not only a useful subordinate, but again a spontaneous creator, not merely a wheel but besides this a motor force.

In France, where the inverse process has prevailed and become more and more Chinese at each generation, the total of the force lost is immense.

The most productive period of human life extends from fifteen or sixteen up to twenty-five or twenty-six; here are seven or eight years of growing energy and of constant production, buds, flowers and fruit; during this period the young man sketches out his original ideas. But, that these ideas may be born in him, sprout, and flourish they must, at this age, profit by the stimulating or repressive influence of the atmosphere in which they are to live later on; here only are they formed in their natural and normal environment; their germs depend for their growth on the innumerable impressions due to the young man's sensations, daily, in the workshop, in the mine, in the court-room, in the studio, on the scaffolding of a building, in the hospital, on seeing tools, materials and operations, in talking with clients and workmen, in doing work, good or bad, costly or remunerative; such are the minute and special perceptions of the eyes and the ears, of touch and even smell which, involuntarily gathered in and silently elaborated, work together in him and suggest, sooner or later, this or that new combination, economy, perfection or invention.[6374] The young Frenchman, just at this fecund age, is deprived of all these precious contacts, of all these a.s.similating and indispensable elements. During seven or eight years, he is shut up in school, remote from the direct and personal experience which might have given him an exact and vivifying notion of men and things, and of the various ways of handling them. All this time his inventive faculties are deliberately sterilized; he can be nothing but a pa.s.sive recipient; whatever he might have produced under the other system he cannot produce under this one; the balance of debit and credit is utter loss.--Meanwhile, the cost has been great. Whilst the apprentice, the clerk busy with his papers in his office, the interne with his ap.r.o.n standing by the bedside of the patient in the hospital, pays by his services, at first for his instruction, then for his breakfast, and ends in gaining something besides, at least his pocket-money, the student under the Faculty, or the pupil in a special school is educated and lives at the expense of his family or of the State; he gives back in exchange not work that is useful to mankind, none that is worth anything on the market; his actual consumption is not compensated for by his actual production. Undoubtedly, he cherishes the hope that some day or other he will obtain compensation, that we will refund later and largely both capital and interest, and all the advances made; in other words, his future services are discounted and, as far as he is concerned, he speculates on a long credit.--It remains to be seen whether the speculation is a good one; whether, at last, the receipts will cover the expenses, in short, what will be the net or average returns on the man thus fashioned.[6375]

Now, among the forces expended, the most important to take into account is the time and attention of the pupil, the sum of his efforts, this or that quant.i.ty of mental energy; he has only a limited provision of this, and, not only is the proportion of this which the system consumes excessive, but, again, the application of it which the system enforces is not remunerative. The provision is exhausted and by a wrong use of it, with scarcely any profit.--In our lycees, the pupil sits at his task more than eleven hours a day; in a certain ecclesiastical college it is twelve hours, and, from the age of twelve years, through the necessity of being first in compet.i.tion as well as for securing the greatest number of admissions through various examinations.--At the end of this secondary education there is a graduated scale of successive test, and first the baccalaureat. Fifty out of one hundred candidates fail and the examiners are indulgent.[6376] This proves, first of all, that the rejected have profited by their studies; but it likewise proves that the program of the examination is not adapted to the general run of minds, nor to the native faculties of the human majority; that many young men capable of learning by the opposite method learn nothing by this one; that education, such as it is, with the kind and greatness of the mental labor it imposes, with its abstract and theoretical style, is beyond the capacity of the average mind.--Particularly, during the last year of cla.s.sical studies, the pupils have had to follow the philosophy lectures: in the time of M. Laromiquiere, this might be useful to them; in the time of M. Cousin, the course, so far, did but little harm; at the present day, impregnated with neo-Kantism, it injects into minds of eighteen, seventeen, and even sixteen years, a metaphysical muddle as c.u.mbersome as the scholasticism of the fourteenth century, terribly indigestible and unhealthy for the stomachs of novices; the swallow even to bursting and throw it off at the examination just as it comes, entirely raw for lack of the capacity to a.s.similate it.--Often, after failure at the baccalaureat, or on entering the preparatory or Grande ecoles, the young people go into, or are put into, what they call "a box" or an "oven" a preparatory internat, similar to the boxes in which silkworms are raised and to the ovens where the eggs are hatched. In more exact language it is a mechanical "gaveuse"[6377] in which they are daily crammed; through this constant, forced feeding, their real knowledge is not increased, nor their mental vigor; they are superficially fattened and, at the end of the year, or in eighteen months, they present themselves on the appointed day, with the artificial and momentary volume they need for that day, with the bulk, surface, polish and all the requisite externals, because these externals are the only ones that the examination verifies and imposes.[6378] Less harshly, but in the same manner and with the same object, operate the special education services which, inside our colleges and lycees, prepare young men for the ecole de Saint-Cyr and for the polytechnic, naval, central, normal, agricultural, commercial and forestry schools; in these too, the studies are cramming machines which prepare the pupil for examination purposes. In the like manner, above secondary education, all our special schools are public cramming machines;[6379] alongside of them are private schools advertised and puffed in the newspapers and by posters of the walls, preparing young men for the license degree in Law and for the third or fourth examinations in Medicine. Some day or other, others will probably exist to prepare them for Treasury inspectors, for the "Cour des Comptes," for diplomacy, by compet.i.tion, the same as for the medical profession, for a hospital surgeon and for aggregation in law, medicine, letters or sciences.

Undoubtedly, some minds, very active and very robust, withstand this regime; all they have been made to swallow is absorbed and digested.

After leaving school and having pa.s.sed through all grades they preserve the faculty of learning, investigating and inventing intact, and compose the small elite of scholars, litterateurs, artists, engineers and physicians who, in the international exposition of superior talent, maintain France in its ancient rank.[6380]--But the rest, in very great majority, nine out of ten at least, have lost their time and trouble, many years of their life and years that are useful, important and even decisive: take at once one-half or two-thirds of those who present themselves at the examinations, I mean the rejected, and then, among the admitted who get diplomas, another half or two-thirds that is to say, the overworked. Too much has been required of them by exacting that, on such a day, seated or before the blackboard, for two entire hours, they should be living repertories of all human knowledge; in effect, such they are, or nearly so, that day, for two hours; but, a month later, they are so no longer; they could not undergo the same examination; their acquisitions, too numerous and too burdensome, constantly drop of their minds and they make no new ones. Their mental vigor has given way, the fecund sap has dried up; the finished man appears, often a finished man content to be put away, to be married, and plod along indefinitely in the same circle, entrenched in his restricted vocation and doing his duty, but nothing more. Such are the average returns--a.s.suredly, the profits do not make up for the expenses. In England and in America where, as before 1789 in France, the inverse method is followed, the returns are equal or superior,[6381] and they are obtained with greater facility, with more certainty, at an age less tardy, without imposing such great and unhealthy efforts on the young man, such large expenditure by the State, and such long delays and sacrifices on families.[6382]

Now, in the four Faculties of Law, Medicine, Science and Letters, there are this year 22,000 students; add to these the pupils of the special schools and those who study with the hope of entering them, in all probably 30,000. But there is no need of counting them; since the suppression of the one-year voluntariat, the entire body of youths capable of study, who wish to remain only one year in barracks and not remain there to get brutalized during three years, flocks to the benches of the lycee or to those of a Faculty.[6383] The sole object of the young man is not, as before, to reach the baccalaureat; it is essential that he should be admitted, after a compet.i.tion, into one of the special schools, or obtain the highest grades or diplomas in one of the Faculties; in all cases he is bound to successfully undergo difficult and multiplied examinations. At present time (1890), there is no place in France for an education in the inverse sense, nor for any other of a different type. Henceforth, no young man, without condemning himself to three years of barrack life, can travel at an early age for any length of time, or form his mind at home by free and original studies, stay in Germany and follow speculative studies in the universities, or go to England or to America to derive practical instruction from factory or farm. Captured by our system, he is forced to surrender himself to the mechanical routine which fills his mind with fict.i.tious tools, with useless and c.u.mbersome acquisitions that impose on him in exchange an exorbitant expenditure of mental energy and which is very like to convert him into a mandarin.