Depuis 1880, l'enseignement primaire

Since 1880, Primary Education and What It Should Be

Naudy

SEVENTH CAHIER OF THE FOURTEENTH SERIES

CAHIERS DE LA QUINZAINE, periodical appearing every other Sunday, PARIS, 8, rue de la Sorbonne, ground floor.

INTRODUCTION

The system of education that a political regime endeavors to apply permits one to appreciate exactly its moral value; there is no more certain criterion, and one may even say without exaggeration that it is the only true criterion, the only possible criterion.

And in fact, all the governments that have succeeded one another in France have left, as the indelible mark of the spirit that animated them, the conception they formed of the manner of instructing and raising the young, the care they showed in preparing for them masters capable of ensuring the methodical and harmonious development of their faculties according to the role they assigned them in advance within society as they understood its organization.

The old regime left it entirely to the Church to provide education, and it was principally the nobility, and almost exclusively even the young men, that one concerned oneself with. With few exceptions, it was for them that schools were opened and maintained. What characterizes the old regime above all in the matter of popular education is the absolute power of the clergy in the choice of masters, in the direction and surveillance of schools, whether it assumed this itself or royal edicts, such as the edict of 1665, officially recognized it; it is moreover, whatever may have been said, the precarious, humiliating, and miserable situation of the teachers; and finally the mediocrity of their wages and the still greater mediocrity of their knowledge.

It appears that some exigence was had only in matters of religion, and that the principal cause for the dismissal of a teacher was always a lack of absolute submission to ecclesiastical authority or an insufficiency in the matter of religious instruction.

As a document, we give the literal copy of a “Certificate of Lay Teacher,” dated April 7, 1790, issued to the teacher of Villorceau (department of the Loiret). This official document, emanating from the ecclesiastical authority, will show what preoccupations guided the clergy under the old regime in the choice of teachers as in the enumeration of the duties it imposed upon them. One will note that of the seventeen articles composing “the admonitions,” not a single one is of a pedagogical nature.

CERTIFICATE OF LAY TEACHER

Nicolas-Joseph d’Anglebermes, Priest, Licentiate of Laws, Canon and Scholastic of the Church of Orleans, Chancellor of the University of said city. Being informed of the good life, morals, and capacity of the person of Paul Voisin, native of the parish of Villorceau, and that he professes the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion, we have given and give him by these presents the power to open and keep a School for Boys in the Parish of said Villorceau of this Diocese, there to teach reading and writing; on condition that he receive therein only Boys; that he shall have principally the care to raise them in piety and in the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman religion; that he shall teach the Catechism of the Diocese three times a week; that he may not keep School elsewhere than in the above-designated Parish without written permission from us, we reserving the right to inspect it whenever we shall deem it proper: we enjoin him moreover to observe exactly the Admonitions hereto attached. In witness whereof we have signed the presents, have had our seal affixed thereto, and have had the same countersigned by our Clerk, which shall be valid only so long as it shall please us.

Given at Orleans, the seventh day of the month of April, one thousand seven hundred and ninety.

D’ANGLEBERMES

Here was the seal. By the Command of the Scholastic: PILLEBOUT.

ADMONITIONS

A schoolmaster must continually represent to himself that the function he exercises has always been regarded in the Church as very important, since the first instructions of childhood are almost always indelible in the minds of men. He must therefore consider himself, with respect to the young Boys entrusted to his care, as though he were their spiritual father; and in this view he must teach them, before all things, to obey God, and then their parents; teach them the principles of the Faith, the Lord’s Prayer, the Angelic Salutation, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Commandments of God and of the Church; and in order to make this instruction easy, the Master shall be required to have in his School a Picture or Image representing our crucified Lord, or the Most Holy Virgin, before which, before beginning the Lessons, he shall have the Scholars kneel, and shall have one of them recite politely and in a loud voice the Morning Prayer at the morning class, and the Evening Prayer at the evening class, as they are in the Catechism of the Diocese.
As instruction ordinarily makes less impression on the minds of children than examples, the Schoolmaster will succeed much more surely in forming the Scholars to the practice of the duties of Religion if he observes them exactly himself, as he is obliged to do.
The rule of Christian Schools being to present the children at the Tribunal of Penance at the feasts of Easter, Pentecost, the Assumption of the Most Holy Virgin, All Saints, and Christmas, the Schoolmaster shall have care, at the approach of said feasts, to concert with the Parish Priest to agree on the day when he may bring the Scholars to him for confession. As for himself, he must not only approach the Sacraments at said Solemnities, but good example would further require that he do so regularly every month: we exhort him to follow this holy practice.
The Master shall have care to assemble, on Sundays and Feast days, the Boys of his School, to attend Divine Service; he shall place them in the part of the Church intended for them: he shall be at their head in order to keep them in the modesty befitting the holiness of the house of God.
The Master shall likewise have care to have the Boys of his School hear holy Mass every day, insofar as this shall be practicable; and when he leads them to the Church, he shall have them walk two by two modestly.
The Master shall use no other Catechism than that of the Diocese to teach his Scholars: he shall have them recite it at least three times a week. Nothing shall be innovated in the charity schools, whose custom is to have it recited every day.
The Master shall have no book read, other than the Usages of the Diocese, without having obtained written permission: he shall do his best so that those of the children in his class who are equally advanced in reading have the same books, taking care, in making them read, that they contract no bad habits of pronunciation, and that they observe the accents, periods, and commas.
The Master shall always have great respect for the Parish Priest, and shall take his advice on everything that may contribute to the good of his School.
The Schools shall be in session every working day of the week, twice a day, morning and evening, with the exception of Thursday afternoon, which shall be granted to the Scholars for their relaxation.
Schoolmasters shall maintain peace and union among themselves: and in case they have any dispute concerning School matters, they shall apply to Us, so that what is proper may be settled. They shall not defame one another, and shall say no injuries, on pain of dismissal.
No Master shall take lodging in the same street as another Master like himself, without our permission.
No Master shall attract to himself, in any manner whatsoever, the Boys who attend other Schools, on pain of dismissal.
Every Master who shall know of someone keeping School without commission from Us shall notify Us or our Promoter, so that it may be provided for.
No Master shall lodge in his home persons of ill repute; he himself shall not lodge with any such persons, on pain of dismissal.
If a Master be married, and his wife be approved by Us to keep a School for girls, We forbid them to keep their Schools in the same house, on pain of being interdicted or dismissed.
The Royal authority having joined that of the Church to forbid Schoolmasters to receive girls in their Schools, and Schoolmistresses to receive Boys therein, We forbid every Schoolmaster to receive any girl in his School, on pain of dismissal, which penalty he shall incur even for having contravened but once our present prohibition; and we warn him that in contravening the provision contained in the present Article, he falls from that very moment into a Reserved Case in this Diocese.

Thus, under the old regime, there existed only a small number of schools intended for the children of the people; they were established according to the chance of pious foundations and could disappear without awakening any scruple in the rulers, who seemed almost to ignore them, and who left it entirely to the Church to direct and supervise them. And this is understandable: the king’s government had no need of enlightened subjects; what it demanded of them was absolute obedience, passive obedience in everything and for everything; cultivated minds, men of open intelligence and awakened conscience would have been a real danger for the regime. It sufficed that the two privileged orders, those who were the masters of the third, be educated, and it was a wise concern, a shrewd policy, that the masses, the people, should remain in ignorance; thus they would be more easily governable.

Finally, nowhere does one find any evidence that anyone concerned themselves with providing those who were to exercise the functions of teaching (and even at all levels of teaching) with the means of extending their knowledge, and still less with the means of directing what knowledge they may have acquired in the direction best suited to their mission.

The exception must be made for the Brothers of the Christian Schools, who received some direction before being placed at the head of a school or class. They owed this privileged education to the Abbe Jean-Baptiste de La Salle, who, having founded in 1680 the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, at the request of the parish priests of several neighboring villages that lacked teachers, opened at Reims in 1684 a “Seminary for Schoolmasters” where masters for rural districts were to be trained.

A few years later, in 1691, de La Salle opened in Paris two schools and in 1698 created on the rue de Lourcine an “urban seminary” for the preparation of teachers for the city. There they taught catechism, reading, writing, spelling, grammar, arithmetic, the system of weights and measures, and church singing. To this seminary was annexed a charity school where future masters practiced the art of teaching under the direction of an experienced brother.

THE CURRENT SITUATION

It would be supremely unjust to deny the value of the improvements that the Third Republic has gradually introduced into the service of primary education; this is even the title of glory which, with infinite reason, it invokes and claims with the greatest energy. Like the men of the Revolution, like the men of 1848, like all men enamored of liberty, and because they well knew all the dangers of ignorance in a country of universal suffrage living under a democratic regime, the republicans of 1870, resuming the tradition of their great ancestors, interrupted by the intermediate reactions, wanted to reduce the number of illiterates; more than that, they wanted that no little French child should leave childhood without having received at least the first elements of the most usual knowledge, indispensable for entering any career, without having been initiated into the principles that are the very basis of all civic and social education.

Hence that long series of school laws, decrees, orders, regulations of public administration, and general instructions to which all ministers of public instruction have attached their names and which have assured them the eternal gratitude of the entire democracy.

However, all these advances could not be obtained all at once, by a single comprehensive law, at a single period. Before the difficulties of the moment, political or financial, before the desperate resistance of the reactionary parties and the clergy allied for this occasion, before the hostility of some, before the pusillanimity of others, it was necessary to divide the questions, to stagger the reforms.

To summarize, let us say that all the legislative documents in force do not have a common soul, as would however be fitting above all. One perceives in them too much the influences of the moment; one senses the difference of times and men. It is therefore not surprising that in their application, unforeseen difficulties appeared, causes of hesitation and friction in execution, regrettable abandonment of essential prescriptions, divergences of interpretation detrimental in more than one respect, and above all strange omissions, gaps, whose practice then showed the importance.

THE PROBLEM AND ITS SOLUTION

For all these essential reasons, and for others still that will emerge in the course of this study, it therefore appears that the hour has come to proceed with the elaboration of a single law concerning the organization of Primary Instruction over the entire territory of the Republic, to sift, coordinate, and animate with a single spirit all the rules, all the prescriptions, all the requirements and all the recommendations that make up the increasingly cluttered and decreasingly homogeneous framework of the service of national education at its first level.

Let us be clear, and let there be no misunderstanding; we do not propose to simply choose from among the numerous texts of laws currently in force those articles that, not clashing too much with one another, might be joined together to compose a law, more or less, that would be merely the corrected and reduced re-edition of the earlier laws. That would be vain work.

What we wish to do is prepare the elements of a new law, well homogeneous in spirit and text, and taking account above all of present needs; an organic law that marks progress; a law that constitutes a serious attempt toward the improvements foreseen; a law, finally, of which Republicans can be proud; which may win the approval of the entire nation, because it will be animated by a powerful breath of liberty and will give satisfaction at once to families and educators.

ACADEMIC INSPECTIONS

Let us enter into the detail. What do we see? The head of the departmental service of primary education, the inspector of the academy, a graduate of secondary education, chosen exclusively from among the professors of secondary education, for reasons that have nothing in common with the requirements of the service. It is a mystery to no one that reasons of health and political influences determine the choices of the Higher Administration.

How can this Director, even if he be competent — which is not always the case, given his origins and the guarantees of competence required of him at the time of his appointment — how, I say, can this Director make judicious choices, since he is ignorant of the personnel from which the heads of service he must install are drawn?

And it is this head, to whom everything about primary education is unknown, who may perhaps never understand it or never love it, who has difficulty freeing himself from the preconceptions of his origin — it is to him that falls the duty of directing it, of taking the initiative in choosing methods, of giving his opinion on the professional value of the masters who teach, of penetrating the so complicated and delicate workings of the various establishments of the primary order.

And to conclude with a practical proposal, let us say that we do not wish that, overnight, transformations as radical as those we propose, whose consequences will be of such great scope, should be carried out all at once, everywhere, by a sudden order from the law. There would be a manifest danger in this for the realization of the reform.

What would be needed would be to refine the project, obtain authorization to try it out in two or three departments, with inspectors of the academy, primary inspectors, and normal-school professors who are well convinced of the necessity of the reform under the prescribed conditions. And to proceed gradually, so as to harm no one, for one must respect the rights acquired by age and by services rendered.

As for the staff of the normal schools for women, who would be called upon to disappear, at least in part, they would easily find, as the reform proceeded, their place in the upper primary schools or in the professional schools to be created, or in the feminine inspectorate, of which, at the same time, a complete trial could be made.

But let something be done, let something happen.

Naudy