Higher Education.—Like the other stages of education, the universities are now emancipated from ecclesiastical control, and may be regarded as part of the national system of education. The university is now coördinate and under the same authority with the church, for both Universities, state institutions, but controlled by charters and decrees. are legally state institutions. Universities can, therefore, be established only by the state or with the approval of the state. In general, however, they are not controlled by legislation, but through charters and special decrees of the minister of education. As their income from endowments and fees is very small, they are for the most part supported by the state. They are managed internally by the rector and senate. The rector is annually chosen from their number by the full professors, with the approval of the minister, and the senate is a committee from the various faculties. The professors are regarded as civil servants with definite privileges, and they are appointed by the minister, although the suggestions of the faculty concerned are usually respected.
During the nineteenth century new institutions for the cultivation of science in application to practical and technological purposes have developed from technical schools of a more elementary character. While known Technische Hochschulen. as ‘technical high schools’ (Technische Hochschulen), they are institutions of higher learning, and exist side by side with the universities. They include schools of engineering, mining, forestry, agriculture, veterinary medicine, and commerce.
DIAGRAM OF GERMAN EDUCATION
Fig. 48.
Educational Development in France.—The development of a centralized system of education in France began almost a century later than in Germany. During the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century the different monarchic powers were not at all favorable to training the masses, and popular education was badly neglected. It required several revolutions in government and the establishment of a permanent republic, to break the old traditions completely, and to make it evident that universal suffrage should be accompanied by universal education. Just after the middle of the First agitation for elementary education during the Revolution. eighteenth century the revolutionary spirit began to manifest itself with the appearance of Rousseau’s Emile (see p. 222), and, except for the training started by the Christian Brothers (see p. 140), the first serious attention was given to elementary education. Rolland, to whom a general plan for reorganization had been committed, recommended universal education and an adequate number of training schools for teachers. While his proposals were not adopted, they were the basis of much of the short-lived legislation that arose during the Revolution, and of the great principles of educational administration that have since been established.
Napoleon, from the beginning, endeavored to reorganize education upon a better basis, and when he had become emperor, ordered all the lycées, secondary colleges, and faculties of higher education to be united in a single corporation, dependent upon the state and known Napoleon and the University of France. as the ‘University of France’ (1808). This decree of centralization divided the country into twenty-seven administrative ‘academies,’ each of which was to establish university faculties of letters and science near the principal lycées.
This organization, however, did not include elementary education, and little attempt was made to provide for schools of this grade before the reign of Louis Philippe. Upon the advice of his great minister of education, Through Guizot primary schools began. Guizot, that monarch organized primary education, requiring a school for each commune, or at least for a group of two or three communes, and starting higher primary schools in the department capitals and in communes of over six thousand inhabitants (1833). He also instituted inspectors of primary schools, and established department normal schools under the more effective control of the state authorities. The plan for higher primary schools was never fully realized, and the institutions of this sort that had been established disappeared during the second empire. The reactionary law of Falloux (1850) did not even mention these schools, but encouraged the development of denominational schools.
The Primary School System.—Guizot, however, had given a permanent impulse to popular education, and during the third republic foundations for a national system Under third republic primary system was completed. of education have rapidly been laid. Schools have been brought into the smallest villages, and elementary education has been made free to all (1881) and compulsory between the ages of six and thirteen (1882). To provide trained teachers, every department has been Normal schools. required to provide a normal school for teachers of each sex; and two higher normal schools, one for men and one for women, to train teachers for the departmental normal schools, have been opened by the state (1882). Higher primary and continuation schools. The higher primary schools have been reëstablished and extended (1898), and ‘supplementary courses’ offered for pupils remaining at the lower primary schools after graduation. The studies in the supplementary courses are technical, as well as general, and some of the higher primary schools have been established for vocational training rather than literary. In addition, there are continuation ‘schools of manual apprenticeship’ in the various communes, subsidized by the state for industrial and agricultural education, and five large schools for training in special crafts have been organized in Paris. Institutions for children between two and six years of Maternal schools. age became part of the primary system in the days of Guizot (1833), and half a century later the present name, écoles maternelles (see p. 244), was adopted (1881), although there have since been marked reforms made in the curriculum.
Secularization.