CHAPTER V
SECULAR AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
Education in France has neither the moral nor social value it has in England. In the first place, public-school life has nothing like the importance it has with us, where a university education almost suffices to make a gentleman of a young man, for, whatever his origin may be, the Oxonian is pretty sure to plume himself on the prestige of his training. In France there is no equivalent for this rank. Where a man has been educated is of no consequence to him in after life. While he is at school, his parents, if they happen to be nobles, or snobs who desire to pass for nobles, or as belonging to a set bien pensant, like to be able to say that their son is at the school of Vaugirard, Madrid, La Poste, or at the Marists. This fact suffices to pose a family with the hall-mark of indisputable correctness. Neither the Jesuits nor the Marists offer such solid advantages in the way of pretension and reputation as the English universities do, but they secure youth from the taint of Republicanism, and Society knows that it can rely on their support when the long and expected coup d’êtat comes off. In certain circles, to be educated Is not the main thing, but not to be mistaken for one of the canaille.
M. Demolins wrote a book, A quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons, which made a considerable stir. The author maintains that the violent contrast between the two races starts in the schoolroom, and reveals to us already the deep-seated causes of their differences. The French boy is trained in the suppression of all independence, the discouragement of all initiative. Those brought up in the secular lycées have nothing to remember but unqualified misery. The system is less intolerable for the day-pupils. These come at eight and leave at seven. Each class lasts two hours, and if the boy’s way lies through any of the big gardens, he can enjoy, with other outdoor comrades, many an hour of play. The indoor martyrs are less privileged, for each moment of recreation is as severely guarded as the hours of class. They have stated intervals for play; in the earlier years they are contented with running, but, by-and-by, they crave for more violent and interesting exercise, and when these are denied them, they give up play. Until lately, all violent games were forbidden in the lycées because they were regarded as dangerous, and the college principals are responsible for all accidents that happen in their schools. Not long ago a proviseur was heavily fined because one of the students, in flinging a stone, had accidentally broken a window and hurt another boy’s eye. It is easy enough, under such extraordinary circumstances, to understand the proviseur’s persistent discouragement of rough games. Skating is not allowed, for this, too, is dangerous; and, for the same reason, gymnastics are permitted only once a week, each student going in turn to the gymnasium and staying there for about three minutes. And so in French colleges these blustering years of boyhood know no other variety of pleasure than the treadmill of the courtyard. Backwards and forwards they walk in recreation hours, talking together; and need it be supposed that the words of wisdom are ever on their lips? As I have said, the day-students do not need much pity. They can make the lycée merely a daily accessory of life—a place they go to generally with the intention of wasting their time. Should they have the good-fortune to light upon a first-rate teacher, which is rare, they will get some profit from the hours spent at the lycée. But the indoor student is wretched. He is a dejected being, with none of the distractions of his age—unboyish, unjoyous, watched and watching, prematurely demoralised by his fellow unfortunates, and, like them, the slave of the very worst possible system of education.
CONSECRATED BREAD
Dagnan-Bouveret
M. Demolins complains that the French rely too much on stiff examinations as a test of knowledge, and a French youth writes me on this subject: “We have a great many schools in France; as many as there are professions, since nobody who has not spent two or three years in some sort of school, and undergone innumerable examinations, can hope to do anything. For instance, I have undergone nine examinations, and it is not even over! Naturally, I only refer to necessary examinations. They begin at the age of fifteen or sixteen. Before that period you must have been at a lycée or college. A lycée is a government establishment, and a college belongs to its township. The training is identical, but the college professors are less well paid. Their inferiority to the lycée professors lies in the fact that they have not undergone so many examinations as these, or, perhaps, only have come out of them less successfully. In the lycées and colleges there are two methods—the literary or old method, and the scientific or new one. The old method is general: literature, geography, history, German or English (never both), Latin, Greek, mathematics, every year; in the first years only zoölogy, botany, and geology, and in the last years philosophy. But always the most important thing is Latin. The youth who has gone through the course of philosophy has learnt Latin for seven years, Greek for five years and a half, but, knowing that his Latin will be of no service to him after he has passed his baccalauréat, as soon as he thinks he knows enough for that examination—and he thinks so at an early hour—he flings his Latin books at the head of his professor or recklessly goes to sleep upon them, if he be working merely for place as a bureaucrat; and I, for one, have not the heart to blame him. Unfortunately, it is the same thing for German, and English, and everything else. Amongst a hundred young men in the philosophy class, not more than two will understand or speak German, and never more than one will speak English. Amongst a hundred French youths speaking German or English you will find that ninety-nine have spent some years in Germany or England; the hundredth is a phenomenon. Besides, it is fashionable to-day in France not to know a word of a foreign tongue. The scientific method is less general than the literary method. It comprises chiefly sciences and modern languages—German, English, Spanish, and Italian. It is certainly more serious than the other. There is a baccalauréat, too, but unlike the literary baccalauréat, which is an aim, the scientific baccalauréat is only the means of arriving at an aim. The literary baccalauréat leads to nothing, or to the law school, which is almost the same thing, for, speaking generally, the students have no other object than the avoidance of the three years’ military service.” The scientific baccalauréat leads to the Polytechnique school, to St. Cyr, or to the school of medicine, but those who wish to become officers or doctors do not leave the lycée after the baccalauréat, and some stay on three or four years longer. The externes, that is, those who go to the lycées only for the classes, are well off, for these find their pleasures and moral training where they should be found, at home and with comrades of their own choosing. But the demi-pensionnaires are nearly as unfortunate as the internes, as these are condemned to most of the prison tortures of one of the worst gifts the genius of Napoleon gave to the land he so basely used. “Everyone knows well enough our dreadful college,” writes M. Demolins, “with its much too long classes and studies, its recreations far too short and without exercise, its prison walks, a monotonous going and coming between high, heart-breaking walls, and then every Sunday and Thursday the military promenade in rank, the exercise of aged men and not of youth.”
For this reason you will never hear a French boy speak with any kindly sentiment of his school-days. Napoleon, who invented the horrid system, was a creature absolutely destitute of kindness or humanity. He wanted more destructive machines, willing for the chance of what is euphemistically called “glory.” Virile independence in boyhood was just the very last thing a man like Napoleon could be expected to value. An English schoolboy will cheerfully go to the wars by force of his own good-will, but he will not be whipped thither by Government whether he wills it or not. And you would never find him submitting, as his French brother does, with patience and resignation to a scholastic system which atrophies his body and unduly heats his brain. The instincts of his race must be considered, and these make for energy, action, and independence.