478. Insufficiency of Daunou’s Scheme.—Nothing could be more defective than Daunou’s plan. The number of primary schools was reduced. It is no longer proposed to proportion them to the population. Daunou goes back to the cantonal schools of Talleyrand: “There shall be established in each canton of the Republic one or more primary schools.” We are far from Condorcet, who required a school for each group of four hundred souls, and from Lakanal, who demanded one for each thousand inhabitants. On the other hand, teachers no longer receive a salary from the State. The State merely assures to them a place for a class-room and lodging, and also a garden! “There shall likewise be furnished the teacher the garden which happens to lie near these premises.” There is no other remuneration save the annual tuition paid by each pupil to the teacher. At the same stroke the teacher was made the hireling of his pupils, and gratuity of instruction was abolished. Only the indigent pupils, a fourth of the whole number, could be exempted by the municipal administration from the payment of school fees. Finally, the programme of studies was reduced to the humblest proportions: reading, writing, number, and the elements of republican morality.
After so many noble and generous ambitions, after so many enthusiastic declarations in favor of the absolute gratuity of primary instruction, after so many praiseworthy efforts to raise the material and moral condition of teachers, and to cause instruction to circulate to the minutest fibres of the social tissue, the Convention terminated its work in a mean conception which thinned out the schools, which impoverished the programmes, which plunged the teacher anew into a precarious state of existence, which put him anew at the mercy of his pupils, without, however, taking care to assure him of patronage, and which, for his sole compensation in case he had no pupils to instruct, guaranteed him the right to cultivate a garden, if, indeed, there should be one in the neighborhood of the school! Had the law of 1795 been in fact the educational will of the Convention, is it not true, at least, that it is after the manner of those wills extorted by undue means, where a man by his final bequests recalls his former acts, and proves himself faithless to all the aspirations of his life?
No, it is not from Daunou, but from Talleyrand, from Condorcet, and from Lakanal that we must seek the real educational thought of the Revolution. Doubtless the measure of Daunou had over all previous measures the advantages of being applied, and of not remaining a dead letter; but the glory of the early Revolutionists should not be belittled by the fact that circumstances arrested the execution of their plans, and that a century was necessary in order that society might attain the ideal which they had conceived. They were the first to proclaim the right and the duty of each citizen to be instructed and enlightened. We are ceaselessly urged to admire the past and to respect the work of our fathers. We do not in the least object to this, but the Revolution itself also forms a part of that past, and we regret that the men who so eloquently preach the worship of traditions and respect for ancestors, are precisely those who the most harshly disparage the efforts of the Revolution.
[479. Analytical Summary.—1. The educational legislation of the French Revolution, apparently so inconsiderate, so vacillating, and so fruitless, betrays the instinctive feeling of a nation in peril, that the only constitutional means of regeneration is universal instruction, intellectual and moral.
2. Out of the same instinct grew the conception that the starting-point in educational reform is the instruction and inspiration of the teaching body. The normal school lies at the very basis of national safety and prosperity.
3. The immediate fruitlessness of the educational legislation of the Revolution, is another illustration of the general fact that no reform is operative, which in any considerable degree antedates the existing state of public opinion. Could there be a revelation of the ideal education, human society could grow into it only by slow and almost insensible degrees. While there can be rational growth only through some degree of anticipation, it is perhaps best that educators have only that prevision which is provisional.]
FOOTNOTES:
[208] A term applied to the most pronounced revolutionists of the Convention and of the National Assembly.
[209] It is impossible, within the limits prescribed by the character and plan of this work, to enter into detail and enumerate all the decrees and counter-decrees of the Convention on the subject of public instruction. To see clearly into this chaos and this confusion, it is necessary to read the excellent article of Monsieur Guillaume in the Dictionnaire de Pédagogie, article Convention.
[210] See a recent sketch, Lakanal, by Paul Legendre (Paris, 1882), with a Preface by Paul Bert.