And he proposes to all people the example of Germany, with her strongly organized system of primary instruction. He demands schools open to all children, “schools of reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion,” in which will be studied both a moral and a political catechism. Attendance on these schools shall be obligatory, and to make compulsion possible, Diderot demands gratuity. He goes even farther, and would have the child fed at school, and with his books would have him find bread.
351. The Conception of Public Instruction.—Like all who sincerely desire a strong organization of instruction, Diderot assigns the direction of it to the State. His ideal of a Russian university bears a strong resemblance to the French University of 1808. He would have at its head a politician, a statesman, to whom should be submitted all the affairs of public instruction. He even went so far as to entrust to this general master of the university the duty of presiding over the examinations, of appointing the presidents of colleges, of excluding bad pupils, and of deposing professors and tutors.
352. Criticism of French Colleges.—Secondary instruction, what was then called the Faculty of Arts, is the principal object of Diderot’s reflections. He criticises the traditional system with extreme severity, and his charge, thought sometimes unjust, deserves to be quoted:—
“It is in the Faculty of Arts that there are still taught to-day, under the name of belles-lettres, two dead languages which are of use only to a small number of citizens; it is there that they are studied for six or seven years without being learned; under the name of rhetoric, the art of speaking is taught before the art of thinking, and that of speaking elegantly before having ideas; under the name of logic, the head is filled with the subtilties of Aristotle, and of his very sublime and very useless theory of the syllogism, and there is spread over a hundred obscure pages what might have been clearly stated in four; under the name of ethics, I do not know what is said, but I know that there is not a word said either of the qualities of mind or heart; under the name of metaphysics, there are discussed theses as trifling as they are knotty, the first elements of scepticism and bigotry, and the germ of the unfortunate gift of replying to everything; under the name of physics, there is endless dispute about the elements of matter and the system of the world; but not a word on natural history, not a word on real chemistry, very little on the movement and fall of bodies; very few experiments, less still of anatomy, and nothing of geography.”[182]
353. Proposed Reforms.—After such a spirited criticism, it was Diderot’s duty to propose earnest and radical reforms; but all of those which he suggests are not equally commendable.
Let us first note the idea revived in our day by Auguste Comte and the school of positivists, of a connection and a subordination of the sciences, classified in a certain order, according as they presuppose the science which has preceded, or as they facilitate the study of the science which follows, and also according to the measure of their utility.[183] It is according to this last principle in particular, that Diderot distributes the work of the school, after having called attention to the fact that the order of the sciences, as determined by the needs of the school, is not their logical order:—
“The natural connection of one science with the others designates for it a place, and the principle of utility, more or less general, determines for it another place.”
But Diderot forgets that we must take into account, not alone the principle of utility in the distribution of studies, but that the essential thing of all others is to adapt the order of studies to the progress of the child in age and aptitudes.
354. Preferences for the Sciences.—Although equally enamored of letters and the sciences, Diderot did not know how to hold a just balance between a literary and a scientific education. Anticipating Condorcet and Auguste Comte, he displaces the centre of instruction, and gives a preponderance to the sciences. Of the eight classes comprised in his Faculty of Arts, the first five are devoted to the mathematics, to mechanics, to astronomy, to physics, and to chemistry. Grammar and the ancient languages are relegated to the last three years, which nearly correspond to what are called in our colleges the “second” and “rhetoric.”[184]