or enfeeble such studies would, in my eyes, be an act of barbarism, a crime against all true and high civilization, and in some sort an act of high treason against humanity.

(e) Middle-class schools. Let our royal collèges then, and even a great proportion of our communal collèges, continue to lead the youth of France into this sanctuary; they will merit the thanks of their country. But can the whole population enter learned schools? or, indeed, is it to be wished that it should? Primary instruction with us, however, is but meagre; between that and the collèges there is nothing; so that a tradesman, even in the lower ranks of the middle classes, who has the honourable wish of giving his sons a good education, has no resource but to send them to the collège. . . . Our collèges ought, without doubt, to remain open to all who can pay the expense of them; but we ought by no means to force the lower classes into them; yet this is the inevitable effect of having no intermediate establishments between the primary schools and the collèges. Germany, and Prussia more especially, are rich in establishments of this kind. I have described several in detail, at Frankfort, Weimar, and Leipsig. The Prussian law of 1819 sanctions them. You perceive, Sir, that I allude to the schools called tradesmen's or burghers' schools, or schools for the middle classes (Bürgerschulen), écoles bourgeoises, a name which it is perhaps impossible to transplant into France, but which is accurate and expressive, as contradistinguishing them from the learned schools (Gelehrteschulen), called in Germany Gymnasia, and in France collèges (in England "grammar-schools") - a name, too, honourable to the class for whose especial use and benefit they are provided, honourable to those of a lower class, who by frequenting them can rise to a level with that above them. The burgher schools form the higher step of primary instruction, of which the elementary schools are the lower step. . . . The Prussian law, which fixes a minimum of instruction for the elementary schools, likewise fixes a minimum of instruction for the burgher schools; and there are two kinds of examination, extremely distinct, for obtaining the brevet of primary teacher for these two gradations. . . . In Prussia this class of schools has, accordingly, very different gradations, from the minimum fixed by the law, with which I have already made you acquainted, to that point where it becomes closely allied with the Gymnasium, properly so called. At this point it sometimes has the name of Progymnasium.

... In general, the German burgher schools, which are a little inferior to our communal collèges in classical and scientific studies, are incomparably superior to them in religious instruction, geography, history, modern languages, music, drawing, and national literature.

In my opinion, it is of the highest importance to create in France, under one name or another, burgher schools, or schools for the middle classes, which give a very varied education; and to convert a certain

number of our communal collèges into schools of that description. I regard this, Sir, as an affair of state. . . .

(f) Local control for the schools. I regard as another incontestable point, the necessary intervention of the municipal and departmental councils in the management of public instruction. As there ought to be a school in every commune, so there ought to be for every communal school a special committee of superintendence, which ought to be formed out of the municipal council, and presided over by the maire....

After the administrative authorities, it is unquestionably the clergy who ought to occupy the most important place in the business of popular education. How is it possible they could neglect, nay, even repugn, such a mission? But that they have done so is a fact, which, however deplorable, we are bound to acknowledge. The clergy in France are generally indifferent, or even hostile, to the education of the people. Let them blame themselves if the law does not give them great influence over primary instruction; for it was their duty to anticipate the law, and to take up a position which they must necessarily have continued to occupy. The law, offspring of facts, will therefore place small reliance on the clergy; but if it rejected them altogether, it would commit. an egregious fault; for it would set the clergy in decided opposition to primary instruction, and would engage in a conflict, open, scandalous, and perilous. The rational middle course is to put the curé or the pastor, and if need be both, on every communal committee; and the highest dignitary of the church in each department, on the departmental committee...

(g) Private teachers and schools. As to private teachers, and what people are pleased to call liberty of primary tuition, I can only repeat what I have said elsewhere, we must neither oppose it, nor reckon upon it. There are branches of the public service which must be secured against all casualties by the state, and in the first rank of these is primary instruction. It is the bounden duty of government to guarantee it against all caprices of public opinion, and against the variable and uncertain calculations of those who would engage in it as a means of subsistence. On this principle are founded our primary normal schools in each department, bound to furnish annually the average number of schoolmasters required by the department. We must rely exclusively on these normal schools for the regular supply of communal teachers.

But if, in the face of our primary communal schools, there are persons who, without having passed through the normal schools, choose to establish schools at their own risk and peril, it is obvious that they ought not only to be tolerated, but encouraged; just as we rejoice that private institutions and boarding-schools should spring up beside our royal and communal collèges. This competition cannot be otherwise than useful, in every point of view. If the private schools prosper,

so much the better; they are at full liberty to try all sorts of methods, and to make experiments in teaching, which, on such a scale, cannot be very perilous. At all events, there are our normal schools. Thus all interests are reconciled, the duties of the state, and the rights of individuals; the claims of experience, and those of innovation. Whoever wishes to set up a private school must be subject to only two conditions, from which no school, public or private, can on any pretext be exempt, the brevet of capacity, given by the commission of examination, and the supervision of the committee of the commune and of the inspector of the department. I would very readily give up the certificate of moral character, as illusory, and as implicitly contained in that of fitness. . . .

(h) The law to represent experience. All these measures, on which I will not enlarge, are more or less founded on existing facts; they have the sanction of experience; it would be simply advantageous to add that of law. On all the points concerning which the law is silent, experiments might be made. Among these experiments some would probably be successful; when sufficiently long practice had confirmed them, they might be inserted in a new law; or ordonnances and instructions, maturely weighed by the royal council, would convert them into general and official measures. Nothing must pass into a law which has not the warranty of success. Laws are not to be perilous experiments on society; they ought simply to sum up and to generalize the lessons of experience.

285. Guizot on the Law of 1833

(M. Guizot, An Address made on introducing the Law in the French Chamber of Deputies, 1832; trans. in Barnard's Am. Jour. of Education, vol. xx, pp. 236-37) On the experience of Prussia as a basis (Rs. 280, 284), M. Guizot, Minister of Public Instruction from 1832 to 1837, prepared and had enacted the famous Law of 1833, organizing primary and higher primary instruction for France. In introducing the bill he made a lengthy Address, from which the following extracts, which give the general nature of the bill, are taken.

(a) History of primary education up to 1832. In framing this bill, it is experience, and experience alone, that we have taken for our guide. The principles and practices recommended have been supplied to us by facts. There is not one part of the mechanism which has not been worked successfully. We conceive that, on the subject of the education of the people, our business is rather to methodize and improve what exists, than to destroy for the purpose of inventing and renewing upon the faith of dangerous theories. It is by laboring incessantly on these maxims, that the Administration has been enabled to communi

cate a firm and steady movement to this important branch of the public service; so much so, that we take leave to say, that more has been done for primary education during the last two years (1831, 1832), and by the Government of July, than during the forty years preceding, by all the former Governments. The first Revolution was lavish of prom

ises, without troubling itself about the performance. The Imperial Government exhausted itself in efforts to regenerate the higher instruction, called secondary; but did nothing for that of the people. The restored Dynasty, up to 1828, expended no more than 50,000 francs annually upon primary instruction. The Ministry of 1828 obtained from the Chamber a grant of 300,000 francs. Since the revolution of July, 1830, a million has been voted annually

that is, more in two years than the Restoration in fifteen. Those are the means, and here are the results. All of you are aware that primary instruction depends altogether on the corresponding Normal Schools. The prosperity of these establishments is the measure of its progress. The Imperial Government, which first pronounced with effect the words, Normal Schools, left us a legacy of one. The Restoration added five or six. Those, of which some were in their infancy, we have greatly improved within the last two years, and have, at the same time, established thirty new ones; twenty of which are in full operation, forming in each department a vast focus of light, scattering its rays in all directions among the people.

(b) The two grades of primary instruction. The first degree of instruction should be common to the country and the towns; it should be met with in the humblest borough, as well as in the largest city, wherever a human being is to be found within our land of France. By the teaching of reading, writing, and accounts, it provides for the most essential wants of life; by that of the legal system of weights and measures, and of the French language, it implants, enlarges, and spreads everywhere the spirit and unity of the French nationality; finally, by moral and religious instruction, it provides for another class of wants quite as real as the others, and which Providence has placed in the hearts of the poorest, as well as of the richest, in this world, for upholding the dignity of human life and the protection of social order. The first degree of instruction is extensive enough to make a man of him who will receive it, and is, at the same time, sufficiently limited to be everywhere realized. It is the strict debt of the country toward all its children.

But the law is so framed that by higher elementary schools, primary

instruction can be so developed, so varied, as to satisfy the wants of those professions which, though not scientific, yet require to be acquainted with "the elements of science, as they apply it every day in the office, the workshop, and field."

...

(c) The training of the teacher. All the provisions hitherto described would be of no effect, if we took no pains to procure for the public school thus constituted an able master, and worthy of the high vocation of instructing the people. It can not be too often repeated, that it is the master that makes the school. . . . A bad schoolmaster, like a bad parish priest, is a scourge to a commune; and though we are often obliged to be contented with indifferent ones, we must do our best to improve the average quality. We have, therefore, availed ourselves of a bright thought struck out in the heat of the Revolution, by a decree of the National Convention in 1794, and afterward applied by Napoleon, in his decree, in 1808, for the organization of the University, to the establishment of his central Normal School at Paris. We carry its application still lower than he did in the social scale, when we propose that no schoolmaster shall be appointed who has not himself been a pupil of the school which instructs in the art of teaching, and who is not certified, after a strict examination, to have profited by the opportunities he has enjoyed.

286. Principles underlying the Law of 1833

(M. Guizot, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de mon temps. 8 vols., Paris, 1858-61; trans. of chapter in Barnard's Amer. Jour. of Education, vol. xx, pp. 266–67) M. François Pierre Guillaume Guizot (1787-1874), in the Mémoires which he wrote to illustrate the history of his life, devoted a chapter to his work as Minister of Public Instruction for France, a position he held during the constructive period from 1832 to 1837. In this he describes the formation of the important Law of 1833, and the principles which guided his action and that of his colleagues. The following extract is interesting as illustrating the tender feeling still existing toward religious education, and also toward the rights of parents to educate their own children in their own way, or not at all, as they saw fit, on the part of the conservative statesmen of the time.

The first point, and the one which, not only in my estimation, but in that of many sound thinkers, still remains undecided, whether the elementary instruction of all children should be an absolute obligation imposed by the law on their parents, and supported by specific penalties in case of neglect, as adopted in Prussia and in the greater portion of the German States. I have nothing to say in respect to the countries where this rule has been long established, and acknowledged by