6378 ([return])
[ An old professor, after thirty years of service, observed to me by way of summing up: "One half, at least, of our pupils are not fitted to receive the instruction we give them.">[
6379 ([return])
[ Lately, the director of one of these schools remarked with great satisfaction and still greater naïveté: "This school is superior to all others of its kind in Europe, for nowhere else is what we teach taught in the same number of years.">[
6380 ([return])
[ But what if Taine was mistaken? What if he, like so many other highly talented and intelligent men, took his own superb intelligence and imagination for granted? What if the talent of such men is inherited? We know from identical twins how many of our particularities have been given to us at birth. What if most men are lazy and especially intellectually so, what if we can only be made to learn and think when under great stress, the stress introduced by fear of dismissal or hope of promotion or riches? Then the French system is perhaps hard, perhaps expensive but certainly useful in producing the great number of hardworking and competent and passively obedient supervisors and civil servants that any large organization needs. (SR.)]
6381 ([return])
[ "Souvenirs", by Pasquier (Etienne-Dennis, duc), chancelier de France, in VI volumes, Librarie Plon, Paris 1893. Although pupils were admitted in the preparatory Schools very early, "our navy, engineer and artillery officers were justly esteemed the best instructed in Europe, as able practically as theoretically; the position occupied by artillery and engineer officers from 1792 in the French army sufficiently attests this truth. And yet they did not know one tenth of those who now issue from the preparatory schools. Vauban himself would have been unable to undergo the examination for admission into the Polytechnic School." There is then in our system "a luxury of science, very fine in itself, but which is not necessary to insure good service on land or at sea." The same in civil careers, with the bar, in the magistracy, in the administration and even in literature and the sciences. The proof of this is found in the men of great talent who, after 1789, were prominent in the Constituent Assembly. In the new-born University there was not one half of the demand for attainments as is now exacted. There is nothing like our over-loaded baccalauréat, and yet there issued from it Villemain, Cousin, Hugo, Lamartine, etc. No École Polytechnique existed, and yet at the end of the eighteenth century in France, we find the richest constellation of savants, Lagrange, Laplace, Monge, Fourcroy, Lavoisier, Berthollet, Haüy, and others. (Since the date of these souvenirs (1843) the defects in the French system have gotten worse.]
6382 ([return])
[ In England and in the United States the architect and engineer produce more than we do with greater pliancy, fertility, originality and boldness of invention, with a practical capacity at least equal and without having passed six, eight or ten years in purely theoretical studies.—Cf. Des Rousiers, "La Vie Américaine," p. 619: "Our polytechnicians are scientific erudites.... The American engineer is not omniscient as they were, he is special." "But, in his specialty he has profound knowledge; he is always trying to make it more perfect by additions, and he does more than the polytechnician to advance his science" or his art. (Since Taine noted this times have changed; I once put my 3 older sons into the American school in Bangkok (in 1972), and not only did they not learn anything during their year there, they actually lost some of their reading and writing skills and I had to remove them as soon as I could. (SR.)).]