The History of Pedagogy

by Gabriel Compayré

474. Defects of the Central Schools.—The Central Schools of Lakanal resembled, trait for trait, the Institutes of Condorcet. And it must be confessed that here the imitation is not happy. Lakanal made the mistake of borrowing from Condorcet the plan of these poorly defined establishments, in which the instruction was on too vast a scale, and the programmes too crowded, where the pupil, it seems, was to learn to discuss de omni re scibili. Condorcet went so far as to introduce into his Institutes a course of lectures on midwifery! The Central Schools, in which the instruction was a medley of studies indiscreetly presented to an overdriven auditory, do honor neither to the Convention that organized them, nor to Condorcet who had traced the first sketch of them.

475. Positive and Practical Spirit.—However, there was something correct in the idea which presided over the foundation of the Central Schools. We find this expressed in the Essays on Instruction, by the mathematician, Lacroix.[214] Lacroix calls attention to the fact that the progress of the sciences and the necessity of learning a great number of new things, impose on the educator the obligation to take some account of space; and, if I may so speak, of clipping the wings of studies which, like Latin, had thus far been the unique and exclusive object of instruction.

In the Central Schools, in fact, the classical languages held only the second place. Not only were the mathematical sciences, and those branches of knowledge from which the pupil can derive the most immediate profit, associated with the classics, but the preference was given to them. In the minds of those who organized these schools, the positive and practical idea of success in life was substituted for the speculative and disinterested idea of mental development for its own sake. In reality, these two ideas ought to complete each other, and not to exclude each other. The ideal of education consists in finding a system which welcomes both. But in the Central Schools the first point of view absorbed the second. These establishments resembled the industrial schools of our day, but with this particular defect, that there was a determination to include everything in them, and to give a place to new studies without wholly sacrificing the old. Let there be created colleges of practical and special instruction; nothing can be better, for provision would thus be made for the needs of modern society. But let no one force literary studies and the industrial arts to live together under the same roof.

476. Great Foundations of the Convention.—In the first years of its existence, the Convention had given its attention only to primary schools. It seemed as though teaching the illiterate to read was the one need of society. In the end the Convention rose above these narrow and exclusive views, and turned its attention towards secondary instruction and towards superior instruction. It is particularly by the establishment of several special schools for superior instruction that the Convention gave proof of its versatility and intelligence.

In quick succession it decreed and founded the Polytechnic School, under the name of the Central School of Public Works (March 11, 1794); the Normal School (October 30, 1794); the School of Mars (June 1, 1794); the Conservatory of Arts and Trades (September 29, 1794). The next year it organized the Bureau of Longitudes, and finally the National Institute. What a magnificent effort to repair the ruins which anarchy had made, or to supply the omissions which the old régime had patiently suffered! Of these multiplied creations the greater number remain and still flourish.

477. Law of October 27, 1795.—Those who ask us to see in the decree of October 27, 1795, “the capital work of the Convention in the matter of instruction, the synthesis of all its previous labors and proposals, the most serious effort of the Revolution,”[215] evidently put forward a paradox. Lakanal and his friends would certainly have disavowed a law which cancels with a few strokes of the pen the grand revolutionary principles in the matter of education,—the gratuity, the obligation, and the universality of instruction.

The destinies of public instruction are allied to the fate of constitutions. To changes of policy there correspond, by an inevitable recoil, analogous changes in the organization of instruction. Out of the slightly retrograde constitution of 1793 there issued the educational legislation of 1794, of which it could be said that “the spirit of reaction made itself painfully felt in it.”

Daunou, who was the principal author of it, doubtless had high competence in questions of public instruction; but with a secret connivance of his own temperament he yielded to the tendencies of the times. He voluntarily condescended to the timidities of a senile and worn-out Assembly, which, having become impoverished by a series of suicides, had scarcely any superior minds left within it.