France -- Civilization; France -- Politics and government; France -- Social life and customs -- 19th century
should be willing to establish and support it; otherwise, the father
of a family is constrained to read the secular journal to his
children, which he deems badly composed and marred by superfluities and
shortcomings, in brief edited in an objectionable spirit. Such is the
way in which the Jacobin State respects the liberty of the individual.
On the other hand, through this operation, it has extended and fortified
itself; it has multiplied the institutions it directs and the persons
whom it controls. To direct, inspect, augment and diffuse its primary
instruction, the State has maintained 173 normal schools for teachers,
male and female, 736 schools and courses of lectures in primary,
superior and professional instruction, 66,784 elementary schools, 3,597
maternal schools, and about 115,000 functionaries, men and women.[63105]
Through these 115,000 officials, representatives and megaphones,
Secular Reason, which is enthroned at Paris, sends its voice even to
the smallest and most remote villages. It is this Reason, as our rulers
define it, with the inclinations, limitations and prejudices they have
need of, the near-sighted and half-domesticated grand-daughter of that
other formidable sightless, brutal and mad grandmother, who, in 1793
and 1794, sat under the same name and in the same place. With less of
violence and blundering, but by virtue of the same instinct and with
the same one-sidedness, the latter employs the same propaganda. She
too wants to seize the new generations, and through her programs and
manuals, her insinuations and summaries of the Ancient Régime, the
Revolution and the Empire, by her perceptions of recent or contemporary
matters, through her formulae and suggestions in relation to moral,
social and political affairs, it is of her and she alone, that she
preaches and glorifies.
VI. Summary.
Total and actual effect of the system.--Increasing
unsuitableness between early education and adult life.
--Change for the worse in the mental and moral balance of
contemporary youth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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