The History of Pedagogy

by Gabriel Compayré

In order to live, they were not only obliged to accept these church services, but they also became shoemakers, tailors, innkeepers, millers, etc. The teacher of the commune of Angles, in the High Alps, was a “barbers’ surgeon.”

Thus there was no assured salary, and consequently no moral consideration. “In the communes, teachers were regarded as strangers and not as citizens; like tramps and vagrants, they were not admitted to the assemblies of the commune.”

410. The Recruitment of Teachers.—Nowhere were there normal schools for the training of teachers. The schools were entrusted to the first comer. The bishop granted his approbation, or permission to teach, after an examination of the most summary kind. The duties of teaching were the means of subsistence which were accepted without call and without serious preparation. In Provence, school-masters attended kinds of “teachers’ fairs” for the purpose of being hired. In the Alps, teachers were numerous, but only in winter. They tarried in the plain and in the valleys only during the inclement season. They returned home for the labors of the summer.

Consequently, most of the schools existed only in name. “The schools,” we are told,[203] “were in vacation for four or five months.” For a half of the year, the school-masters were free to follow another trade, or, rather, to devote themselves more completely to their ordinary trade, which their school duties did not always interrupt.

411. What the School Itself was.—School-houses were most frequently merely wretched huts, wooden cots, and narrow ground-floors, badly lighted, which served at the same time as a domicile for the school-master and his family, and as a class-room for pupils. Benches and tables were things rarely seen, and pupils wrote while standing.

In a word, the state of primary instruction, when the States-General opened in 1789, was as follows: schools few in number and poorly attended; few lay teachers, trained no one knows how, without thorough instruction, and, as they themselves said, “degraded” by their inferior position; few or no elementary books; gratuity only partial; finally, a general indifference for elementary instruction, which philosophers like Voltaire, and Rousseau, and Parliamentarians like La Chalotais, themselves lightly esteemed.

412. The Proper Work of the Revolution.—I do not say that the Revolution accomplished all that there was to be attempted in order to bring instruction up to the needs of the new society; but it purposed to do this. Every time a liberal ministry has decided to work for the promotion of instruction, it has revived its plans; and it is these same plans that by a vigorous effort public authority has attempted to realize in recent times.

413. The Reports of 1789.—Already, in the reports of 1789, public opinion vigorously pronounced itself in favor of educational reforms. “The cahiers of 1789, even those of the clergy and the nobility, demand the reorganization of public instruction on a comprehensive plan. The cahiers of the clergy of Rodez and of Saumur demand ‘that there may be formed a plan of national education for the young’; those of Lyons, that education be restricted ‘to a teaching body whose members may not be removable except for negligence, misconduct, or incapacity; that it may no longer be conducted according to arbitrary principles, and that all public instructors be obliged to conform to a uniform plan adopted by the States-General.’ The cahiers of the nobility of Lyons insist that ‘a national character’ be impressed on the education of both sexes. Those of Paris demand ‘that public education be perfected, and extended to all classes of citizens.’ Those of Blois, ‘that there be established a council composed of the most enlightened scholars of the capital and of the provinces and of the citizens of the different orders, to form a plan of national education, for the use of all the classes of society, and to edit elementary treatises.’”[204]

414. Mirabeau (1749-1791).—From the first days of the Revolution, pedagogical literature abounds, and gives evidence of the ever-growing interest which public opinion attaches to educational questions. The Oratorians, of whom La Chalotais said, “that they were free from the prejudices of the school and of the cloister, and that they were citizens,” present to the National Assembly a series of scholastic plans. On its part, the Assembly sets itself at work; Talleyrand prepares his great report, and Mirabeau embodies his own reflections in four eloquent discourses.