education, but the agreement amongst the various plans shows the meaning
and bearings of our principle. "Children generally, without exception,
says Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau,[21106] the boys from five to twelve,
the girls from five to eleven years of age, must be brought up in common
at the expense of the Republic; all, under the sacred law of equality,
are to receive the same clothing, the same food, the same education, the
same attention "in boarding-schools distributed according to cantons,
and containing each from four to six hundred pupils.
"Pupils will be made to submit every day and every moment to the same
rigid rules... Their beds must be hard, their food healthy, but simple,
their clothing comfortable, but coarse." Servants will not be allowed;
children must help themselves and, besides this, they must wait on the
old and infirm, lodged with or near them. "Among daily duties, manual
labor will be the principal thing; all the rest will be accessory."
Girls must learn to spin, sew and wash clothes; the boys will work the
roads, be shepherds, ploughmen and work-hands; both will have tasks set
them, either in the school-workshops, or in the fields and factories in
the neighborhood; they will be hired out to surrounding manufacturers
and to the tillers of the soil. Saint-Just is more specific and
rigid.[21107] "Male children from five to sixteen years of age, must
be raised for their country. They must be clad in common cloth at all
seasons, and have mats for beds, and sleep eight hours. They are to have
common food only, fruits, vegetables, preparations of milk, bread and
water. They must not eat meat before sixteen.. Their education, from ten
to sixteen, is to be military and agricultural. They will be formed into
companies of sixty; six companies make a battalion; the children of
a district form a legion; they will assemble annually at the district
town, encamp there and drill in infantry tactics, in arenas specially
provided for the purpose; they will also learn cavalry maneuvers and
every other species of military evolution. In harvest time they are to
be distributed amongst the harvesters." After sixteen, "they enter
the crafts," with some farmer, artisan, merchant or manufacturer, who
becomes their titular "instructor," and with whom they are bound to
remain up to the age of twenty-one, "under the penalty of being deprived
for life of a citizen's rights.[21108]... All children will dress alike
up to sixteen years of age; from twenty-one to twenty-five, they will
dress as soldiers, if they are not in the magistracy."--Already we show
the effects of the theory by one striking example; we founded the "Ecole
de Mars;"[21109] we select out of each district six boys from sixteen to
seventeen and a half years old "among the children of sans-culottes;"
we summon them to Paris, "to receive there, through a revolutionary
education, whatever belongs to the knowledge and habits of a republican
soldier.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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