THE PRIMARY SCHOOLS OF FRANCE.

[We regret that this letter was crowded out of the last issue, and trust that in future there will be no interruption of the series. - EDS.]

FOR the purpose of preparing these teachers, there exist in France the so-called Normal Schools, of which I wish to say a word, as they are intimately connected with the Primary Schools. The pupils enter them at the age of sixteen or eighteen years, just the period at which the heart and mind of the young are most susceptible of development. It is then, in the spring of life, that the mind opens and expands like a flower under the rays of the morning sun. Well, I regret to say it, in these normal schools there are no ideas communicated; instead of broadening, they have the contrary effect of narrowing one's views. The pupils are taught to read, write, and calculate arithmetical problems; they are instructed in religion, and, in fine, they are educated, or rather (for the word is not apt) are fashioned, like machines. During the three years that they pass here they turn upon their own footsteps without making a single advance, like the horses in a riding-school. They graduate without any knowledge of French literature, or of the history of other nations. And not only are they ignorant, but the germs even of all free thought are, as it were, crushed out of them. They have no longer any independent ideas when they have completed their course. They are, in a word, pure machines. Such is the sad result of the clerical and Jesuitical instruction.

Now, what are such men worth? And yet these are the very men to whom is intrusted the charge of making our children good citizens and good men! They are not such themselves, nor can they be, either the one or the other. I cannot but be reminded of the ancient Romans who left the education of their children to their slaves.

You must not think, however, that I include all instructors in this category. There are occasionally some who survive this treatment, and, recovering their health of mind, exercise their reasoning faculty and dare to think, in spite of the prefect, in spite of the cure. This class certainly does not constitute a majority, and, in any case, at the first occasion they abandon a position which offers few advantages in return for numberless annoyances and troubles constantly recurring. Indeed, I have not been speaking so much of instructors in particular as of the whole class, and especially of the deplorable system by which they are formed, or, rather, de-formed.

Besides this system of communale schools, there are other powerful schools which exercise a very general influence. These are directed by priests and sisters of charity, and are called Christian, as if the others were not. I leave you to judge what instruction or notion of education men can give who are the avowed enemies of the modern spirit of progress, that spirit which has taken for its motto, liberty, enlightenment, progress. If I have in any degree been successful in my endeavors, you should now have a clear idea of the state of public instruction in France and of the manner in which it is given. Without any circumlocution, without any false pride, I have shown you the defects of our system. Does this mean that I regard the French people as inferior to the other peoples of the earth? Not at all. I believe that our intelligence is as great, our mind as open, as that of any other nation in the world. Simply, we have never been able, or known how, to take advantage of our resources. We are a people of routine, bound down by the deadly fetters of a bigoted clergy, which abhors everything modern, whose ideal is in the past, in the dark centuries of the Middle Ages. What, then, is lacking to the French as a nation? Only wise direction and government.

You will pardon me for having lingered so long on primary instruction. Is it not by their primary instruction, which is that of the people, that one judges of the enlightenment of a nation? Is it not, secondly, the degree of education which exerts the most powerful influence in a republic, or state desirous of a republic, in a country in love with liberty, and whose government is founded on universal suffrage?

In my next letter I shall speak of Secondary Instruction of colleges and lyceums.

V. J. R.