The Central Schools
We saw in the last chapter how the educational theory of the Revolution stood in marked contrast to what had gone before. From the beginning of our academic history, from the Carolingian period, education had had man as its exclusive subject-matter: sometimes considered solely in his capacity as a logical being; sometimes, with the establishment of the humanities, as an integrated whole; and it is this which accounts for the formalism from which educational thinking never managed to escape. Never, I believe, has human thought carried anthropocentricity so far. The educational thought of the Revolution turned in precisely the opposite direction; it was towards the external world, towards nature that it directed itself. It was the sciences which tended to provide the centre of gravity for education.
Up to that time children had been sustained in an environment inhabited by pure ideals, abstract entities; now the need was felt to educate them in the school of reality. The change was not simply a matter of degree or of dosage; it was not enough simply to be aware of the inadequacy of an education which was exclusively literary, and of the need to give some place to a different kind of training. What took place was a veritable right-about-turn; and what caused this was the importance which contemporary public opinion accorded to purely temporal functions which the Middle Ages and even the Renaissance had considered as being inferior in rank and dignity. The civil interests of society henceforth appear sufficiently respectable for education to concern itself with them. It was because Protestantism was already sensitive to the secular side of society that the Protestant countries provided the location in which this new educational theory originated. It was because eighteenth-century France acquired this sense that this same viewpoint emerged here at this time without, as far as one can tell, any direct borrowing or imitation having taken place, but simply because the same cause produced the same effect.
The nature of this kind of educational thinking which was to triumph with the Revolution shows clearly how one-sided and narrow is the way in which Taine had defined the revolutionary spirit. He saw in it only a form and, as it were, an extrapolation of the Cartesian spirit which, having been applied during the seventeenth century to the things of mathematics and physics, is supposed in the succeeding century to have expanded into the realm of politics and morals. And, of course, it cannot be doubted that the eighteenth century received Cartesianism as a legacy in just the same way as it has handed it down to us, and moreover it is a legacy which we must cultivate and not allow to decay. But the history of the development of educational thought shows us that, in addition to this inherited intellectual tendency, the eighteenth century also had another one which it developed for itself and which bears the stamp of the age. What is characteristic of it is the feeling for reality, the feeling for things, for the place which they occupy in our intellectual and moral life, for everything they are capable of teaching us. We have here a cast of mind which is quite opposite to that of the mathematician and the Cartesianism; if we leave this out of account, we can see only one aspect of the moral and political doctrines of the time, and consequently we are not in a position to understand them. We must not, however, lose sight of the fact that it is from Condorcet and the encyclopaedists that Saint-Simon, Comte and all the positive philosophy of the nineteenth century derived.
Between this orientation of the revolutionary spirit and the old spirit of the University there was a radical incompatibility. Never perhaps has there been such a striking discordance between the concerns of public opinion, its hopes and tendencies, and the state of education.
At this period, when illustrious men of learning were so numerous in all the different fields of natural science, when great discoveries were proliferating, when consequently the sciences inspired such great enthusiasm that people expected them to produce a complete regeneration of man and society, they had nevertheless managed to secure for themselves a place in the colleges only marginally more substantial than previously. Science teaching was entirely concentrated in the second year of philosophy. Here a little mathematics was taught, but not a word of natural history, not a mention of chemistry. As for physics, what was taught under this title was merely a form of abstract metaphysics. ‘Almost everywhere,’ says Diderot, ‘in the name of physics people would wear themselves out in arguments about the ultimate elements of nature and the ultimate order of the universe.’ Experimental physics finally infiltrated the classes only very sporadically. What was taught amounted to very little: a few ideas about movement and gravity, Mariotte’s law, the equilibrium of liquids, and the weight of air. With the colleges so fundamentally out of tune with the public mind it was inevitable that they should appear with their antique organisation as simply so many obstacles to necessary progress; thus it was never even to occur to the men of the Revolution to preserve and use them for the new educational ends after which they were striving.
From the beginning they proclaimed the necessity of wiping the slate clean, of abolishing them completely, and starting out from basics to build an entirely new system which would accord with the needs of the time. It is not the case that this work of reconstruction was improvised. The question was posed as early as the constituent assembly and it subsequently remained permanently on the agenda. At each of the three great revolutionary assemblies plans for reorganisation were examined and debated, the reports were presented by persons of the greatest importance: by Talleyrand to the constituent assembly, by Condorcet to the legislative assembly, by Romme, Sieyes, Danou, Lakanal to the convention (vide Hippeau: Public Instruction in France during the Revolution). The works of the committee for public education, appointed by the Convention, were already on the point of publication and already covered many pages of quarto. However, it was only after the ninth Thermidor that this was brought to fruition. A law, dated year 3, which was modified a few months later after the third of’ Brumaire’ in year 4, finally established the new in-stitutionalisation of education, which had been so long expected, under the title of the ‘Central Schools’.
Two different ideas dominate the entire academic achievement of the Revolution. First, there is the encyclopaedic viewpoint, which was held so dear by all the great thinkers of the period. Here we have a belief which we have already found expressed in Comenius, and which indeed is characteristic of the whole philosophical movement from Bacon and Hobbes to Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte: that science is a unity, that its different parts are interdependent and inseparable from one another, forming an organic whole, and that consequently education should be organised in such a way that it respects and even creates awareness of this unity. This accounts for the tendency to institute an academic system in which all the scientific disciplines would take their place according to a methodically organised plan. Talleyrand (who was not even an encyclopaedist) was already saying that ‘ education should be universal in its goals. The various branches of knowledge which it embraces may not be equally useful; but there is not one of them that cannot be genuinely useful, which cannot become more so and which ought, consequently, to be rejected or neglected. Rather there exists between them a timeless alliance, a mutual interdependence .... From this it results that, in a well organised society, although no one can succeed in knowing everything, it is nevertheless essential for everyone to have the opportunity of learning everything.’
Condorcet proceeds on the same basis at least with respect to those schools with which he intended to replace the colleges and which, under the new name ‘ Institutes’, are the real prototypes of the Central Schools; which means that in his system they are the establishments where secondary education takes place. ‘ The third level of education,’ he says (the Institutes were counted third because Condorcet wanted a hierarchy of two sorts of primary schools rather like upper and lower junior schools),’ deals with the elements of all the branches of human learning. Education ... is absolutely complete here .... Here will be taught not only what it is valuable to know as a man, as a citizen, in the interests of some profession to which one aspires; but also anything that might be of value regarding each of the major categories of profession.’ All the sciences, all aspects of human study will have a place there.
However, it is clear even from this passage that practical and professional considerations were hovering over this whole organisation. The important thing was to equip the child to acquit himself usefully in the social function which it would one day fall to him to fulfil. Now, professional education is necessarily specialised. The knowledge demanded by one profession is useless to another. Polymathy becomes a futile burden, in as far as one is trying to get the pupil to cope with a restricted task. Two opposite tendencies were in conflict; yet the members of the Convention thought that it was possible to reconcile them. To do this they deliberately abandoned the system of classes as it had established itself in the colleges at the end of the fifteenth century, and they set about replacing it with an entirely new organisation. Each particular discipline provided the subject-matter for an autonomous course which was pursued year by year until it reached its natural end; it was run by one and the same teacher. There was thus a regular gradation from one year to the next within the same course; in other words, each course was divided into several sections corresponding to the number of years during which it would normally last. But the different sections of the course were entirely different from one another; they were not linked to one another as they are in our classes so that each pupil is obliged to progress at the same pace as his contemporaries in each of the subjects taught. In short, the former unity of the class became dissolved in a plurality of parallel courses. In this way the pupil who arrived at the Central School could either follow only one course, or several, or all of them (the time-tabling was supposed to allow for this simultaneity of study). He might belong in the first section for one branch of teaching and in a different section for another. Consequently it was easy for him, according to the preference of his family, either to have an integrated education or alternatively to select and combine the specialised courses which would be the most useful to him in his chosen career. It was he himself or his parents who determined his course of study.
Such a system goes so much against what we are used to that at first sight we are apt to be disconcerted; we will examine shortly what is to be thought about it. But at any rate, we must beware of thinking that the convention had recourse to it as a mere expedient, thought up at the eleventh hour and not adequately considered. The idea had been propounded for a long time and it was bolstered by the authority of the most influential men of the eighteenth century. Condorcet had already sponsored it in the legislative assembly. ‘Education,’ he says, ‘will be divided into courses .... These will be so arranged that a pupil will be able to follow four courses simultaneously or else to follow only one. In the space of about five years, he will be able to embrace the totality of learning, if he has great ability; to limit himself simply to a part of it if he is blessed with a less fortunate make-up.’ Before him, Talleyrand had foreseen the same arrangement and vigorously criticised the system of classes: ‘ One of the main changes in the organisation will consist in dividing into courses what used to be divided into classes; for the division into classes serves no function ; it fragments teaching, and subjects the pupils each year, in dealing with the same subject-matter, to different methods; with the result that the minds of young people become confused. The division into courses is natural; it separates what ought to be separate; it delineates each separate part of the teaching process. It reinforces the attachment of the teacher to his pupil and establishes a kind of responsibility in the teacher which becomes a guarantee of his zeal.’
In 1782 President Roland, a moderate and thoughtful mind if ever there was one, was already expressing the same idea: ‘ The first difficulty,’ he says, ‘ which occurs to me concerns the limitations and the uniformity of the plan which the University has expounded. In it I see all the young people embarking on the same career, following the same set of classes in the same number of years, and in a narrow space of time all striving towards the same kind and the same degree of knowledge; and yet amongst the young people assembled in the same college I see some whose circumstances are different and who should find different employment. The knowledge necessary for some may prove useless for others and differences of intellectual range, diversity of talent and taste, prevent all from progressing at the same pace and being attracted to the same studies.’ He asks that ‘each subject have its special teachers; each could even be taught in different courses in order to avoid confusion and working at cross purposes. That part of education which concerns morals would be common to all; only the curriculum would be different ...; it would offer the appropriate knowledge to the whole range of intellectual ability and temperament’. As a footnote, he tells us that this is not just his own idea; in particular he refers to a Discourse which was awarded a prize by the academy for floral games (literary competitions) and whose author was a college professor at Toulouse. Thus the idea had been in the air for a long time, and the diversity of the people who accepted and defended it makes it hard to believe that it was without any foundation. For the moment I merely note this; we shall return to the question shortly.
It is worth adding, moreover, that the principle of parallel courses which had been unreservedly written into the first promulgation of the organisational law (year 3) for the Central Schools, was somewhat attenuated and corrected after ten months’ experience (the law of ‘Brumaire’ in year 4). The teaching carried out in these schools, which normally lasted for six years, was arranged into three cycles or sections which were superimposed upon one another. Pupils began in the first at twelve, in the second at fourteen, in the third and last at sixteen. The different subjects taught were shared out between three cycles so that no one could find themselves in two different cycles. Each cycle had its own set of subjects. Drawing was done in the first cycle and there was no question of its appearing in the subsequent ones; the physical sciences were reserved for the second and played no part in the two others (the result was that, since one cycle only lasted for two years, the teaching which took place in it, no matter what it was, could not last longer than that). But within each cycle the autonomy of each of the courses taught there remained intact. The pupil could, according to his pleasure, either follow all of them or follow only one. Consequently his was the final voice in determining his course of study. He had complete freedom to choose the subjects in which he wished to be instructed, except that his age determined the order in which he was to receive the instruction he had chosen.
Let us see now how the internal economy of this system worked.
It is characterised by the predominant place given to those disciplines which are concerned with things, with nature. In the first cycle two out of three courses were of this type: they were drawing and natural history. The second cycle was entirely devoted to mathematics and experimental physics and chemistry. Thus out of the six years which made up the complete course of studies there were four during which the attention of the pupils was almost exclusively directed towards the outside, towards the external world, towards the nature of things. It is indeed a complete reversal of the traditional system; and Fourcroy, in a report to the five hundred, could justly contrast the colleges of the old days in which ‘one spent years regurgitating the elements of a dead language’ with the new schools, of which there were then ninety, in which young people were encouraged to engage in ‘more various and more attractive forms of study. Their active imagination, their insatiable curiosity is nourished by the spectacle of nature and its creations, of the mechanics of the world and the diversity of scientific phenomena. No longer will their intellectual faculties be restricted solely to the study of words and sentences; it is with facts, it is with things that we shall feed their minds.’
However, man was not obliterated in this new system in the same way that nature had been obliterated in all preceding systems. He constituted the object of study which filled the two final years of the courses, that is to say the third cycle. Thus it is only after having studied physical nature that the pupil embarked upon the study of human nature. Moreover, people strove to teach about man and matters human in the same spirit and using the same methods as with things material, that is to say scientifically; in other words the physical and natural sciences which predominated in the first cycles were succeeded by social and moral sciences which had just become established.
Two branches of learning were included. First there was general grammar. The study of general grammar was intended to replace the old formal logic taught in the philosophy classes of the colleges. Instead of describing the mechanism of thought in the abstract an attempt was made to study it and to cause it to be studied by means of the language in which, as it were, it had become crystallised. Thus in a new form, we have a restoration of the ancient conception of grammar which we encountered at the beginning of this history. It was grammar understood as an instrument for logical training.
In addition to man conceived of as pure understanding, the necessity was realised of getting the pupils to understand man as a social being; this was the prescribed goal of two other disciplines which combined to serve this same end: history and legislation. For the history in question was not supposed to consist merely in the teaching of a simple chronology of national events; it was a kind of universal history whose object was first and foremost to illuminate the way in which the great ideas which constitute the foundation of human civilisation became established.’ Above all,’ writes the minister Quinette in year 7, ‘it is crucial to get the pupils to observe the progress of the human mind at different times and in different places, the causes of its progress, of its aberrations and its temporary retrogressions in the sciences, in the arts, in social organisation, and also to get them to see the constant relationship which holds between human happiness and the number and truth of human ideas.’ This historical education was supposed, as one man said who was in a position to observe the functioning of the Central Schools very closely, to furnish the teacher of law ‘ with the set of experiments which he needed to confirm or verify the general principles of the science’ which he had to profess. Indeed law was taken to consist in a description and exposition of the general principles upon which contemporary law and morals were based. The best way of justifying such principles was to show the natural fruit which they had yielded in the course of their evolution in history.
But what of literature, which had only yesterday reigned supreme in education? It was not completely excluded from school but its role had nothing of the prominence which had previously been accorded to it. One course in Latin in the first cycle, one course in literature in the third, and that was all. The Latin course was designed not really to teach the language, which would have been impossible in such a short time, but primarily to supply an object of comparison so that people could better understand their national language. ‘ In order to learn what a language is,’ says Lacroix,’ and in order to form a really clear idea of its forms, it is essential to compare its workings with that of another language.’ Secondly, it was also hoped in this way to stimulate a taste for classical literature, which was ‘the model for our own’, although nobody on this account thought it possible to provide a knowledge of Latin which would enable people to dispense with translations. As for the course in literature, it was purely theoretical and concerned with literary aesthetics; it was restricted to instruction in ‘ the body of the rules established by the critics on the basis of a close examination of the production of genius’. It had absolutely nothing to do, as Lacroix puts it, ‘with developing a talent for writing’, which it was thought could only emerge after maturity. No exercises in composition were demanded, beyond the essays relating to the various courses. It is clear that with its scope reduced in this way the teaching of literature was little more than a remnant of its former self, sustained only by a final feeling of respect for an ancient tradition.
This then was the curriculum. We cannot fail to see how daring it was. Nowhere hitherto have we come across so radical a revolution. No doubt, with the Renaissance, we saw great and important innovations occurring, but they were still not on this scale. The Renaissance had preserved the colleges of the Middle Ages, their organisation, their system of classes, in the same form in which they had become established towards the end of the Scholastic period; in these colleges Latin was already taught, classical authors read and expounded; in short, it was enough to cram the work in logic into the two final years in order to make room for the poets, the orators and the historians. In the Central Schools, by contrast, everything was brand new: the academic groupings, the subject-matter taught, the methods used, the character of the teaching staff, all these were created out of nothing. For the first time an attempt was made to organise the intellectual and moral training of youth upon strictly scientific foundations. Not only was the attempt novel but it has never subsequently been embarked upon with such systematic rigour.
It is true that this boldness has been described as mere rashness and thoughtlessness. It has been said that if this educational system was so ephemeral — it only functioned for six years from year 4 to year 10 — this is because it was not constituted for survival, because it was based upon a viewpoint which was radically unsound. Certainly, as I believe and shall show, the external organisation of the schools, even if it did not make failure inevitable, nevertheless made success rather difficult. But I also believe that the curriculum contained some progressive ideas which are well worth recalling, and it is a matter for profound regret that they were nipped in the bud.
Intense criticism has been directed against the principle of substituting courses for classes. And no doubt the way in which this idea was interpreted justifies some serious objections. We cannot allow every family, according to its whim, to construct the course of studies for each child. A country, at least a country which has attained a certain degree of civilisation, cannot afford to forgo a certain shared culture which could never survive such extreme educational individualism. The institution of compulsory curricula which we saw produced for the first time in the mediaeval universities was a response to real needs which are still with us. A society in which education has become an important factor in social and moral life can no more abandon the educational system than it can the moral system itself to the absolutely arbitrary choice of individuals. If it is necessary that the curriculum take account of the needs of families it must, nevertheless, be first and foremost subordinated to more general and higher interests which, consequently, the families will not be fully competent to appreciate.
But if the absence of all rules has its dangers, regimentation which is too strictly uniform is fraught with disadvantages. The more we progress the more we feel that it is essential for our children not to be subject every one to the same intellectual discipline. The ever-increasing diversity of social functions, and the diversity of vocations and of aptitudes which results from this, demand a corresponding diversity in the educational system. It was this feeling which is still well-grounded that was expressed, albeit somewhat immoderately, not only in the academic system adopted by the Convention but also in the schemes put forward earlier by men such as Condorcet, Talleyrand and Roland. It is interesting to note that the need to diversify secondary education which has prompted our most recent academic reorganisation did not emerge yesterday. Its origins go back to the middle of the eighteenth century; and we shall have a chance of seeing that, ever since, this same idea has steadily gained in strength.
This is not all, for the reforms which the Convention was bold enough to institute need to be explained from another point of view as well. In order to deal as effectively as possible with the diversity of careers and skills, it might after all be enough to establish small teaching units within which the system of classes could be maintained with all its former rigour. But another factor intervened which changed the original nature of the class and so posed the problem which we are not perhaps ready to solve, but which will have to be tackled one day. Essentially the classroom with its indivisible unity presupposes a unity in the teaching. It is only completely justified when the teaching is concentrated on one subject-matter and one subject-matter alone, or on very closely connected subject-matters. Indeed a class is a group of children who are taught together. But the common nature of this instruction which they receive implies that they display a sufficient degree of intellectual homogeneity.
For them to be able to be taught at the same time and in the same way they must not be too far apart from one another intellectually. This homogeneity is easy to obtain when the teaching is restricted to a single discipline or to a few individual disciplines; for there is no difficulty in grouping children together who in this one unique respect have palpably progressed to the same point. This condition was satisfied in our former colleges. Only Latin was taught in them. Even when a little Greek and a little French were added the education did not, after all, demand a kind of aptitude other than the literary. This is no longer the case today when the most diverse and heterogeneous of disciplines are taught in our secondary schools; and already this heterogeneity was very considerable in the Central Schools of the Convention. From then onwards it was fallacious to suppose that the homogeneity necessary to one of these studies would necessarily be carried over to all the others. It is very common for the pupils who are most gifted in letters not to have the same aptitude for the sciences. So by what criteria are we to determine which class they should go into? The degree of their proficiency in letters? In that case they will lag miserably and futilely behind their fellows with respect to everything concerning the sciences. According to the extent of their scientific knowledge ? In that case they will be wasting their time in literary exercises. The diversity of the subjects taught is thus difficult to reconcile with the rigidity of the system of classes. This is what the men of the Revolution were intensely aware of. And this same sentiment has been subsequently expressed by a number of good minds.
In 1868 Victor Duruy, while recognising that the idea might be difficult to put into practice, nevertheless commended it to the attention of Napoleon III. Ernest Bersot, a moderate thinker if ever there was one, also championed it. ‘ We would like,’ he said, ‘ to get away from viewing the class as an indivisible unity comprising courses in letters, in history, in the sciences both mathematical and physical, a unity which forces the pupils to follow different courses for which they are not equally ready and which, when it is pitched at the right level for some, is too high or too low for others.’ In the course of the investigation for the last inquiry into secondary education the same idea was expressed by several of the people who gave evidence and was categorically endorsed by the commission.
However, it was not completely triumphant. The problem seems, indeed, so complicated that any excessively radical solution must arouse legitimate doubts. The disadvantages of the class cannot be disputed. On the other hand, we must not lose sight of the fact that a group of children working together needs not only a certain degree of intellectual homogeneity; it also needs a certain degree of moral unity, a certain community of ideas and feelings, as it were a small collective mind; this would be impossible if the different groups lacked all fixity and stability, if from one hour to the next they broke up and formed themselves into different groups so that there were a thousand different ways in which they came together and separated. If the same pupils did not have sufficiently continuous contact with one another, if they did not take part in the same exercises, if they were not attached to the same men, subject to the same influences, if they did not live one and the same life, if they did not breathe one and the same moral atmosphere, the spirit of community would be missing. Everyone recognises how inadequate were the moral foundations of those old elementary mathematics classes, precisely because they lacked this unity, being composed of disparate pupils who came from every point in the academic spectrum, from the rhetoric form, from the introductory mathematics form, from the philosophy form, and from other forms.
The truth is that a class is not and should not be a crowd. We have here different requirements, which may even be in conflict, and both of which must be taken into account. At the moment, the only way that I can see of tackling the problem would be, instead of organising the different and unrelated studies in parallel series within the hierarchy of the classes, to group them according to their natural affinities so that each class was defined not by an ordinal numeral but by the nature of the studies which went on in it. This arrangement would be all the more natural because there exists a logical hierarchy amongst the different disciplines and education ought to respect it; moreover, the Convention was aware of this. At all events it is clear that the reforms which the Convention initiated were not the products of a kind of mindless day-dreaming. There existed then, and there still exists, an important problem which remains unresolved; the Convention must be given credit for having raised it even if the solution which was offered for it was not the kind which can be unconditionally accepted. It was by studying the educational theory of the revolutionaries that I became convinced that the system of classes constitutes a problem.
This does not constitute the limit of our indebtedness to it. Everyone recognises the great service which is performed by stressing the educational value of the physical and natural sciences and by according to them a place consistent with their importance. But what has been less remarked upon and what, nevertheless, deserved to be noted was the entirely novel way in which the Convention organised the teaching of the humanities. It was no longer literature which it employed for this purpose, it was again science; but it was science of a new kind. Whereas the natural sciences, although they had been long established, had waited for close on two centuries for the gates of the schools to open to them, the Revolution at a stroke introduced those sciences which had only just been born: the sciences of man and of society.
One might have said that these sciences were still in their infancy, and consequently not worthy of such an honour. And no doubt, given the rudimentary state in which we still find them, they were not up to coping with their task. But this was not a reason for excluding them. There was a case for seeking complementary means of teaching children about things human without outlawing these sciences. Since these sciences suffice for adults, why should they not have been valuable for children between sixteen and eighteen years old ? In the state in which they were, they were already full of fertile insights of the kind which would stimulate reflection in young minds and, consequently, they could have been valuably used as educational instruments. In order to grant to a discipline right of entry into school it is not necessary for that discipline to have taken definitive shape — does this moment ever arise anyway ? It is enough that it should be capable of profitably influencing young minds. I would add finally that the place assigned to these sciences in the Central Schools was right in accordance with their nature. It was fitting that they should be taught after the natural sciences, since they were established later. The ordering of the curriculum should reflect the order in which the sciences being taught have developed historically.
Unfortunately, as I said at the beginning, all the fruitful ideas which were contained in revolutionary educational theory were tainted by the way in which they were put into practice, by grave organisational flaws. The higher education which the Central Schools gave children from the moment they entered presupposed that they had already received a preliminary training of considerable breadth. Remember that they were not taught French; so the assumption was that they had studied it somewhere else. Now, below the Central Schools there were only the primary schools, where what was taught was of an extremely modest nature. Between them and the Central Schools there was a gap which the men of the period were very well aware of, although they did not succeed in filling it. From another point of view we have already pointed out how excessive was the lack of co-ordination between the courses. This lack of co-ordination was intensified still further by the complete absence of any internal direction; the schools did not have a head. Even the aim of each course of study was only very hazily established; to some extent each teacher tailored it to suit himself. Add to that the difficulty of finding teachers for all these new subjects. Remember that in the colleges of the ancien regime neither natural science nor general grammar were taught. Thus a staff had to be assembled impromptu which nothing had prepared for this task. It was recruited from the most varied of professions. Moreover, the choices were made, by local panels, which were not themselves always in possession of the necessary competence.
All these defects, however serious they may be, would not perhaps have sufficed to bring about the ruin of the Central Schools (which seem, at least in certain areas, to have produced satisfactory results), if they had not become the object of political passion. But the Central Schools were the work of the Convention; under the Consulate that alone was enough to discredit them. Moreover, they in no wise conformed to Bonaparte’s educational views. Under pressure from him a law was passed on the eleventh of ‘Floréal’ in year 10 which abolished them, and which at the same time obliterated all the educational theory of the Revolution. The Central Schools were replaced by lycées and in ad-dition small secondary schools which were a preparation for the lycées and which were called colleges. The organisation, the content and the methods of the teaching became once more what they had been under the ancien regime. The sciences only survived because of the military courses. Latin came to predominate once again. It was a return to the old system. Everything was to start again.
In sum, the achievement of the Revolution in the realm of education was more or less what it was in the social and political realms. Revolutionary effervescence was immensely productive of brand-new ideas; but the Revolution did not know how to create organs which could give these ideas life, institutions in which they could be embodied. It might have been because the revolutionary views were often excessive. It might have been because institutions cannot be improvised or plucked out of nothing, and (since those of the ancien regime had been demolished) the essential materials needed for reconstruction were lacking. It might have been for both reasons simultaneously that the Revolution proclaimed theoretical principles far more than it created realities. Even the attempts which it made to translate the theories into realities often redounded to their discredit; for since these enterprises generally ended in failure, the failures were taken as a condemnation of the ideas which had inspired them. These were, however, to survive the backlash which, albeit falteringly, occupied the greater part of the nineteenth century and which proved so difficult to resist and overcome. In this endeavour our finest intellectual forces were engaged throughout this period.
One might say in conclusion that about the only result of all this effort is to have brought us back to the point of departure, to have posed once more the educational problem — and I might add many others as well — in virtually the same terms in which it spontaneously arose at the beginning of the Revolution, except that we are able to take heed from the long experience at our disposal. The result is that the academic history of the nineteenth century was not very rich in innovations; it was a slow, gradual rediscovery of ideas which were already well known to the eighteenth century; consequently it need not detain us long.