France -- Civilization; France -- Politics and government; France -- Social life and customs -- 19th century
This élite of which the University is thus robbed must be got back.
Since the young do not attend the lycée because they like it, they must
come through necessity; to this end, other issues are rendered difficult
and several are entirely barred; and better still, all those that are
tolerated are made to converge to one sole central outlet, a university
establishment, in such a way that the director of each private school,
changed from a rival into a purveyor, serves the university instead
of injuring it and gives it pupils instead of taking them away. In the
first place, his high standard of instruction is limited;[6117] even
in the country and in the towns that have neither lycée nor college, he
must teach nothing above a fixed degree; if he is the principal of an
institution, this degree must not go beyond the class of the humanities;
he must leave to the faculties of the State their domain intact,
differential calculus, astronomy, geology, natural history and superior
literature. If he is the master of a boarding-school, this degree must
not extend beyond grammar classes, nor the first elements of geometry
and arithmetic; he must leave to State lycées and colleges their domain
intact, the humanities properly so called, superior lectures and means
of secondary instruction.--In the second place, in the towns possessing
a lycée or college, he must teach at home only what the University
leaves untaught;[6118] he is not deprived, indeed, of the younger boys;
he may still instruct and keep them; but he must conduct all his pupils
over ten years of age to the college or lycée, where they will regularly
follow the classes as day-scholars. Consequently, daily and twice a
day, he marches them to and fro between his house and the university
establishment; before going, in the intermission, and after the class is
dismissed he examines them in the lesson they have received out of
his house; apart from that, he lodges and feeds them, his office
being reduced to this. He is nothing beyond a watched and serviceable
auxiliary, a subaltern, a University tutor and "coach," a sort of
unpaid, or rather paying, schoolmaster and innkeeper in its employ.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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