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[ Bréal, ibid., pp. 10, 13. Id., "Quelques mots sur l'instruction publique," p. 286. "The internat is nearly unknown in Germany.... The director (of the gymnase) informs parents where families can be found willing to receive boarders and he must satisfy himself that their hospitality is unobjectionable.... In the new gymnases there is no room for boarders."—Demogeot et Montucci, "Rapport sur l'enseignement secondaire en Angleterre et en Ecosse," 1865.—(I venture also to refer the reader to my "Notes sur l'Angleterre," for a description of Harrow-on-the-Hill and another school at Oxford, made on the spot.)]
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[ Taine, "Notes sur l'Angleterre," P.139. The pupils of the superior class (sixth form), especially the first fifteen of the class (monitors), the first pupil in particular, have to maintain order, insure respect for the rules and, taking it all together, take the place of our maitres d'étude.]
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[ Bréal, "Quelques mots, etc.," pp.281, 282. The same in France, "before the Revolution,... except in two or three large establishments in Paris, the number of pupils was generally sufficiently limited.... At Port-Royal the number of boarders was never over fifty at one time."—"Before 1764, most of the colleges were day-schools with from 15 to 80 pupils," besides the scholarships. and peasant boarders, not very numerous.—"An army of boarders, comprising more than one half of our bourgeois class, under a drill regulated and overlooked by the State, buildings holding from seven to eight hundred boarders—such is what one would vainly try to find anywhere else, and which is essentially peculiar to contemporary France.">[
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[ Bréal, ibid., 287, id., "Excursions pedagogiques," p. 10. "I took part (with these pupils) in a supper full of gayety in the room of the celebrated Latinist, Corssen, and I remember the thought that passed through my mind when recurring to the meal we silently partook of at Metz, two hundred of us, under the eye of the censor and general superintendent, and menaced with punishment, in our cold, monastic refectory.">[
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[ Even though Taine had visited Eton and other English schools, he appears to have a somewhat rosy picture of life inside these institutions. I have been 9 years to a similar school and can assure the reader that the headmaster's wife is no suitable substitute for a real mother and her table does not replace one's own home. The rector of my school once stated that boarding schools should only be resorted to when one could not remain at home. It was my impression that this school had two effects upon me: the first that I wanted, in spite of good grades, to stop my studies and get a job and the second that I became, like Taine, an opponent to the system. Later on in life I should come to appreciate all the useful things like languages, literature, math and physics which I had learned in this well-organized school. I also came to understand that much worse than harsh discipline is no discipline and no learning at all, something which happened to my children when they attended, for one year only, the American School in Bangkok. (SR.)]