8. Show that Mann's reasoning as to the strength of the Prussian school system (281) was thoroughly sound.
SELECTED REFERENCES
* Alexander, Thomas. The Prussian Elementary Schools.
* Barnard, Henry. "Public Instruction in Prussia"; in American Journal
of Education, vol. XX, pp. 333-434.
Barnard, Henry. German Teachers and Educators.
* Cassell, Henry. "Adolph Diesterweg"; in Educational Review, vol.
I, pp. 345-56. (April, 1891.)
Friedel, V. H. The German School as a War Nursery.
Lexis, W. A General View of the History and Organization of Public
Education in the German Empire.
* Nohle, E. "History of the German School System"; in Report U.S.
Commissioner of Education, 1897-98, vol. I, pp. 3-82. Translated
from Rein's Encyclopädisches Handbuch der Pädagogik.
* Paulsen, Fr. German Education, Past and Present.
* Paulsen, Fr. The German Universities.
* Russell, James. German Higher Schools.
Seeley, J. R. Life and Times of Stein, vol. I.
CHAPTER XXIII
NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN FRANCE AND ITALY
I. NATIONAL ORGANIZATION IN FRANCE
LINES OF DEVELOPMENT MARKED OUT BY THE REVOLUTION. The Revolution proved very disastrous to the old forms of education in France. The old educational foundations, accumulated through the ages, were swept away, and the teaching congregations, which had provided the people with whatever education they had enjoyed, were driven from the soil. The ruin of educational and religious institutions in Russia under the recent rule of the Bolshevists is perhaps comparable to what happened in France. Many plans were proposed by the Revolutionary philosophers and enthusiasts, as we have seen (chapter xx), to replace what had once been and to provide better than had once been done for the educational needs of the masses of the people, but with results that were small in comparison with the expectations of the legislative assemblies which considered or approved them. Nevertheless, the directions of future progress in educational organization were clearly marked out before Napoleon came to power, and the work which he did was largely an extension, and a reduction to working order, of what had been proposed or established by the enthusiasts of the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary periods. At the time of the Revolution the State definitely took over the control of education from the Church, and the work of Napoleon and those who came after him was to organize public instruction into a practical state-controlled system.
In effecting this organization, the preceding discussions of education as a function of the State and the desirable forms of organization to follow all bore important fruit, and the forms finally adopted embodied not only the ideas contained in the legislation of the revolutionary assemblies, but the earlier theoretical discussion of the subject by Rolland (p. 510), Diderot (p. 511), and Talleyrand (p. 513) as well. They embodied also the peculiar administrative genius of France—that desire for uniformity in organization and administration—and hence stand in contrast to the state educational organizations worked out about the same time in German lands. The German States, as we have seen, had for long been working toward state control of education, but when this was finally attained they still permitted a large degree of local initiative and control. The French, on the contrary, made the transition in a few years, and the system of state control which they established provided for uniformity, and for centralized supervision and inspection in the hands of the State. The forms for state control and education adopted in the two countries were also expressive of age-long tendencies in each. For three centuries German political organization, as we have seen, had been extremely decentralized on the one hand, and had been slowly evolving a system of education under the joint control of the small States and the Church on the other. In France, on the contrary, centralization of authority and subordination to a central government had been the tendency for an even longer period. When the time arrived for the State to take over education from the Church, it was but natural that France should tend toward a much more highly centralized control than did the German States, and the differing political situations of the two countries, at the opening of the nineteenth century, gave added emphasis to these differing tendencies.
[Illustration: FIG. 174. AN OLD FOUNDATION TRANSFORMED
This was an ancient château in France. In 1604 Henry IV gave it to the
Jesuits for a school. In 1791 it became national property, and was
transformed into a Military College.]
In consequence, Prussia and the other German States early achieved a form of state educational organization which emphasized local interest and the spirit of the instruction, whereas France created an administrative organization which emphasized central control and, for the time, the form rather than the spirit of instruction. This was well pointed out by Victor Cousin (R. 280), in contrasting conditions in Prussia with those existing in France.