out France a compulsory continued education which shall be at once technical, general, and physical. The collaboration of the countless private societies is invited. The courses will last from October to March each year and will be of two grades. They will be given in the school, which must provide a library and suitable and attractive accommodation, towards the cost of which the State will contribute. The lower or junior grade will be for boys between the ages of thirteen and seventeen and for girls between thirteen and sixteen. All will receive general instruction in French, history, and geography: in the country the boys will be technically trained in agriculture, theoretical and experimental, while the girls will learn housewifery and sewing. In the towns technical or commercial instruction will be given and nautical instruction in maritime districts. The higher or senior grade will be for adolescents, if boys between the ages of seventeen and twenty, if girls between the ages of sixteen and eighteen or marriage if it comes earlier. The general education will here be more in the nature of lectures on civics, common law, or domestic economy. The physical training is given on Sundays. For boys it consists of games, walks, shooting, and in the senior grade, for boys over seventeen only (this is instructive on the part of a great military nation), military preparation will be given. For girls this training is replaced by practical housewifery and instruction in hygiene, medicine, and the care of children. The general and as a rule, in the country, the technical education will be in the hands of the primary teachers, who will have their school day reduced by half an hour and will receive two months' long vacation. In return they are expected to give at least 150 hours a year to continuation work. More than 200 hours' teaching will be paid at the rate of 100 fr. for each fifty hours (to a foreigner these rates seem insultingly small). Higher primary teachers are paid at the usual rate for extra hours' work; auxiliary masters either give their services or are paid by the private societies or the municipalities. All teaching is free and the teachers must be certified or have proper guarantees in the way of diplomas. In the junior course a minimum of fifty hours' teaching a year is assigned to general education, of 150 to technical and of 100 to physical. The time must be taken off from the working day, at the beginning or the end. Children who are in receipt of higher instruction up to the age of eighteen or are certified as physically unable to profit are exempt. Passing an examination at the end of the third year exempts boys from the fourth year's junior work. In the senior course general education receives a minimum of 100 hours a year and physical a minimum of 100. There is no obligatory technical training. Success in an examination at the end of the second year exempts young men from the third year's schooling. Private societies are given three options: (1) they can have independence, provided they follow the same programmes and submit to inspection: (2) they can have alliance, the society providing the teaching, the State the material equipment; (3) they can have union, the State providing the course and necessary teachers in return for the active and sympathetic collaboration of the society in the general welfare of the students, exercising much the same patronage to the continuation school that the societies of anciens élèves and amis de l'école give to the primary school. An elaborate machinery of committees is set up, the lowest being the commission locale de l'enseignement postscolaire in each commune, which inspects private, and organises public, courses and warns defaulters. Above these are very representative departmental and general commissions. The inspection of the agricultural, technical, and military work is conducted each by its own Ministry. The State, department, or commune can give necessary subsidies to private societies. Sanctions to secure regular attendance are provided by giving to each child a livret scolaire or school record which shows his educational career between the ages of six and twenty. Any public agent can inspect this. Small fines of 5 to 15 fr. are to be inflicted on junior absentees for each offence: older pupils are more severely dealt with and lose besides, as do army delinquents, all access to public employment and the right to receive public decorations. Such is this very thorough and workmanlike scheme which seems sufficiently national in its spirit and wide in its outlook to meet with the success it merits. Nothing less comprehensive will give the dead-lift needed if France is to hold her own in economic competition. I cannot refrain, before concluding this chapter, from mentioning the growing success of the boy scout (éclaireur) movement in France. Although not indigenous it has made a real appeal to the French boy. Between 1912 and 1914 the numbers grew from 1500 to 10,000 and the war has made full use of their youthful patriotism. Scouting provides just those qualities of initiative and physical hardiness which French education has neglected. By its badge-work and club-room life, and most of all by its camping and spirit of adventure, it will probably prove a useful leaven in the public organisation of continued training: it will certainly have an excellent formative influence on those boys of the rising generation who come under its spell. X. CONCLUSION Such then, in rapid summary, is the French educational system, as it stood before the war. I began by saying that nations are always superior to the systems they elaborate, for the spirit has the habit of evaporating and the paralysing grip of the dead hand of the past is wont to cling to the throat of reform. This is surely true of France where, if a foreigner who loves her may be excused the impertinence of criticism, we get so much intellectual competence combined with so little humanity of control. The machine is still over-centralised. too bureaucratic, too systematised, too inelastic, too uniform; apart from the universities the teachers are too magistral, too official; over-inspected as they are, they aim at an inhuman competency within prescribed limits; the free workings of the spirit, "soul kindling soul at the living fire of thought," cannot easily survive in such an air. In considering secondary schools we are tempted to admire their splendid teaching and deplore their educational sterility. A boy is more than a receptive mind, and French boys more than most would instinctively respond to the lead of masters who were filled with the genuine pastoral spirit which seeks to develop body and character as well as intellect. The most satisfactory feature is, perhaps, the university training with its unfettered freedom, its keen intellectuality, its erudite instruction, its genuine love of truth and energy in research. Within their limits, too, one must admire the thoroughness of the primary schools which have produced a high level of pronunciation and of ability to conduct the ordinary affairs of life. Were the teachers adequately paid and given a freer hand there are no elementary schools that could be better, for the French have an equal gift of clear exposition and of ready understanding. Up to now lower technical education is inadequate in its provision for the needs of a great commercial nation, but there is a good prospect of this deficiency being made good. The new scheme for the institution of compulsory continuation schools is masterly and sane, and likely to be of enormous benefit to the country. It may be said, in brief, that the worst feature of French education is the present system of boarding-school life for boys, that its best features are its always competent, and often brilliant, teaching and its careful adaptation of means to the ends it has in view. If only France will bury its rusty hatchets of religious and secular bigotry and place education outside politics as a sphere in which all schools of thought and sentiment shall collaborate in the production of healthy, happy, and useful citizens, the State giving a lead, but allowing all reasonable freedom to individual enterprise and disinterested endeavour, then we shall see realised a national education, varied in its particular outlooks and its individual methods, but united in its ideal to train men, in the widest and deepest sense of the word, for the service of their country and the world. XI. BIBLIOGRAPHY Astier and Cuminal, L'enseignement technique, industriel et com- English Board of Education Reports, vols. i. ii. iii. vii. xv. xviii. xxii. xxiv. Farrington, French Secondary Schools, Longmans, 1915. Farrington, The Public Primary School System of France, Columbia University, 1906. Liard, L'enseignement supérieur en France 1789-1893, Paris, 1894. 2 vols. Lintilhac, Le budget et la crise de l'instruction publique, Hachette, 1913. Marion, L'éducation dans l'université. Norwood and Hope, Higher Education of Boys in England, London, 1909. Nussbaum, Le problème de l'école secondaire. (By a Swiss, an admirable work.) Paquier, L'enseignement professionnel en France, Armand Colin, 1908. Ribot, Enquête sur l'enseignement secondaire, Paris, 1899. 6 vols. Sadler, Continuation Schools in England and Elsewhere, Manchester University Press, 1907. Vaujany, L'école primaire en France sous la troisième république, 1912. CHAPTER V EDUCATION IN CANADA 1 I. INTRODUCTION THE unique characteristics of Canadian education are mainly the reflections of her stage of economic development.] Pioneering is not only " writ large" in Canadian history, but it is still playing an active part in her modern life. Canadian farms are still being carved out of dense bush or ploughed from the virgin sod of the prairie, while the exploitation of Canada's immense mineral and other resources has not progressed beyond that of mere infancy. Nor can it at present be otherwise. Canada is a big country of vast resources, settled in the sparsest of fashions. From a point on Lake Erie in the latitude of Madrid and Rome, Canada stretches to within a few hundred miles of the North Pole; from east to west her width is more than 3000 miles. Her area is 3,739,665 square miles, which-omitting Greece-is the area of the continent of Europe. Canada thus comprises about one-third of the total area of the British Empire. Her natural resources remain almost untouched. Although harvesting in 1915 the following crops in bushels: wheat, 376,303,600; oats, 520,103,000; barley, 53,331,300; rye, 2,394,100; peas, 3,478,850; beans, 723,400; buckwheat, 7,865,900; flaxseed, 10,628,000; mixed grains, 17,523,100; potatoes, 62,604,000; corn for husking, 14,368,000; as well as vast quantities of other crops, the whole being valued at the vast sum of $797,669,500, it was, nevertheless, estimated that not more than one quarter of the arable area was under cultivation at the time. In the same year the mineral production was valued 1 In this brief summary of Canadian education Ontario receives the major portion of attention, and for several reasons. Of all the provinces comprising the Dominion of Canada, it is the richest, most populous and most influential. Its educational system is the oldest, most highly organised, and has naturally served as a prototype for many of the others. During its preparation I have received much valuable criticism from Dean W. Pakenham, Faculty of Education, University of Toronto. |