First there was the idea of a higher normal school, of a seminary for professors. The University had already expressed the wish that such an establishment should be founded. To be convinced how much this pedagogical seminary, conceived as far back as 1763, resembled our actual Normal School, it suffices to note the following details. The establishment was to be governed by professors drawn from the different faculties, according to the different subjects of instruction. The young men received on competitive examination were to be divided into three classes, corresponding to the three grades of admission. Within the establishment they were to take part in a series of discussions, after a given time to submit to the tests for graduation, and finally to be placed in the colleges. Is it not true that there was no important addition to be made to this scheme? Rolland also required that pedagogics have a place among the studies of these future professors, and that definite and systematic instruction be given in this art, so important to the teachers of youth.
Rolland does not stop even there. He provides for inspectors, or visitors, who are to examine all the colleges each year. Finally, he subjects all scholastic establishments to one single authority, to a council of the government, to which he applies the rather odd title, the “Bureau of Correspondence.”
400. Spirit of Centralization.—Whatever opinion may be formed of absolute centralization, which, in our century, has become the law of public instruction, and has caused the disappearance of provincial franchises, it is certain that the parliamentarians of the eighteenth century were the first to conceive it and desire it, if not to realize it. Paris, in Rolland’s plan, becomes the centre of public instruction. The universities distributed through the provinces are co-ordinated and made dependent on that of Paris.
“Is it not desirable,” said Rolland, “that the good taste which everything concurs to produce in the capital, be diffused to the very extremities of the kingdom; that every Frenchman participate in the treasures of knowledge which are there accumulating from day to day; that the young men who have the same country, who are destined to serve the same prince and to fulfill the same functions, receive the same lessons and be imbued with the same maxims; that one part of France be not under the clouds of ignorance while letters shed the purest light in another; in a word, that the time come when a young man educated in a province cannot be distinguished from one who has been trained in the capital?” And he adds that “the only means for attaining an end so desirable is to make Paris the centre of public instruction.”
Besides the gain that will thus accrue to instruction, Rolland sees this other advantage, that, through uniformity in instruction, there will be secured a uniformity in manners and in laws. By means of a uniform education, “the young men of all the provinces will divest themselves of all their prejudices of birth; they will form the same ideas of virtue and justice; they will demand uniform laws, which would have offended their fathers.”
By this means, finally, there will be developed a national spirit, a national character, and a national jurisprudence, “the only means of recreating love of country.” Is it not true that the great magistrates of the close of the eighteenth century deserve also to be counted among the founders of French unity?
401. Turgot (1727-1781).—In his Mémoires to the king (1775), Turgot set forth analogous ideas, and also demanded the formation of a council of public instruction. He made an eloquent plea for the establishment of a civil and national education which should be extended to the country at large.
“Your kingdom, Sir, is of this world. Without opposing any obstacle to the instructions whose object is higher, and which already have their rules and their expounders, I think I can propose to you nothing of more advantage to your people than to cause to be given to all your subjects an instruction which shows them the obligations they owe to society and to your power which protects them, the duties which those obligations impose on them, and the interest which they have in fulfilling those duties for the public good and their own. This moral and social instruction requires books expressly prepared, by competition, and with great care, and a schoolmaster in each parish to teach them to children, along with the art of writing, reading, counting, measuring, and the principles of mechanics.”
“The study of the duty of citizenship ought to be the foundation of all the other studies.”
“There are methods and establishments for training geometricians, physicists, and painters, but there are none for training citizens.”