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KINDERGARTEN MAGAZINE

Vol. XV-SEPTEMBER 1902.-No. 1.

TWENTIETH CENTURY SERIES.

THE RECENT REACTION IN FRANCE AGAINST ROUSSEAU'S NEGATION OF SOCIETY IN EDUCATION.

I

ANNA TOLMAN SMITH, NATIONAL BUREAU OF EDUCATION.*

N the ten minutes at my disposal I can only touch upon the main points of the movement indicated by my subject, omitting all modifying conditions, all proportion and perspective. I have called the movement a reaction against Rousseau's anti-social doctrine, for it is in that light only that it can be fully estimated.

A century and a half have passed since Rousseau electrified Europe with his gospel of individuality. It voiced the protest of millions against a crushing social system and gave direction to their resistance. That resistance culminated in the French Revolution, and has found permanent effect in the French Republic.

We can easily understand that Rousseau's teachings have profoundly affected primary education, the particular agency by which the new social order in France has built itself up. Many of us have felt the charm of the "Émile," but we have never felt it as a Frenchman feels it. It flatters his national pride by the sense of a power which has affected all other peoples, and it thrills his national sympathies by qualities which he adores-precision, lucidity, and extraordinary invention. Rousseau is his world-genius cast in a national type. As such he figures in the French university programs and in the lectures and lessons on pedagogy in all French normal schools.

The ideas advanced in the "Émile" were not, it may be admitted, original with Rousseau, they were ideas widely diffused at the time as vague theories or coldly didactic formulas; Rousseau gave them the power of living personalities.

A single one of these ideas concerns us here, namely, the ef*Read before the National Educational Meeting at Minneapolis, 1902.

facement of society in the educative process. In the case of Émile the effacement is assisted by an isolation of the pupil after the Robinson Crusoe model, but this artificial condition, impossible for the ordinary child and not complete even in the imaginary instance, is not essential to the purpose. The effacement or negation of society is really accomplished in the mind of the tutor. It is in his way of regarding the pupil, the natural man as opposed to civilized man, and in his conception of the educating process. based upon and motived by this notion.

Now these two elements, a principle and its application, comprise all that is essential in a system. They may be generalized as regulations and applied to collective groups of children, or they may be infused into the minds of teachers to generate therein a subtle, potent influence, as has been the case with the French teachers.

But how, we may ask, had social influences penetrated French education before Rousseau's day? By social influences we must understand in this connection the various forms which manifest the spiritual ideals of the race: art, or the expression of man's æsthetic ideals; history, or the record of his institutional ideals, and religion, the expression of his moral ideals.

Up to 1789 these were the essential parts of education in France, as elsewhere. The French Revolution, of which Rousseau has been called the forerunner, destroyed them. They appeared no more in the specialized schools that rose on the ruins of the old universities, nor in those peculiar secondary schools, "les écoles centrales," which in 1795 took the place of the ancient colleges. In the new schools no subjects were to be treated except "such as are plainly within the reach of the understanding," and morals were to be taught upon "the sole authority of nature."

This didactic form of stating Rousseau's precepts passed over to the Republic of 1870 and became a living force in its primary schools.

The programs elaborated for these schools in 1886 gave, it is true, equal recognition to the threefold nature of man, physical, intellectual, and moral, but, under the circumstances, the stress of effort went wholly to the intellectual. The directions with respect to this division have the Rousseau stamp. It is proposed, they say, to instruct the child in a limited number of subjects, but chosen in such a manner that they will not only assure to him all the prac

tical knowledge of which he has need, but that they shall excite his faculties, form his spirit, cultivate and extend it, and constitute a true education. To this end the method of training should be essentially intuitive and practical. In other words, it was education keyed upon the particular interests of the children of the working classes without regard to those ideal possibilities which they share in common with other children.

Both the temper of the people and political necessities tended to detach the state primary school from social and ethical influences. One bond indeed united it firmly to organized society, namely, the industrial demands of a thrifty, practical people, but this was an influence in its essence individual or non-social.

The administration of primary education under the French Republic has been conducted in two distinct, tho not necessarily antagonistic, lines, the one political, the other philosophic. The most significant fact in its remarkable history is the sudden convergence of the two upon one purpose, namely, that of shifting the system from the intellectual or rational to the ethical and social basis.

Tho the preparation has been prolonged and, to an extent, conscious, the change itself has come like the sudden bloom of springtime. It is not the mere verbiage of official decrees, but a living purpose in the minds of teachers, an impassioned enthusiasm for the social whole conceived as the harmonious accord of intelligent minds animated by moral purposes. Everywhere the conviction is strong that even children's minds will respond to this ideal.

On the spiritual side this change is the outcome of the teachings of Marion, of Pecaut and of Puisson; on the political side, it is the outcome of government pressure intensified by clerical opposition. Solidarity has become the watchword in the French State schools, but it is solidarity based upon common standards of right, and the sense of inward unity and mutual obligations.

This change of basis in the system was one of the revelations. of the Paris Exposition. Of all the awards by which the jurors testified their high appreciation of the French educational exhibit, none carried such satisfaction to the recipients as that of a grand prize for the.system of moral instruction. Its author had worked in the spirit of constructive statesmen and the award was a flattering recognition of their purpose and their success. But this

moral instruction carried with it a deepened social consciousness. It is the extreme opposite of Rousseau's isolation, and it calls for a process the reverse of that which his fancy dictated.

In this movement toward national solidarity on the part of the French Republic there is a return to the principle of historic unity. This was illustrated in a striking manner by the retrospective exhibits which formed a unique feature of the Paris Exposition. There is also an evident purpose to center in the school the influences that make for social unity; hence the school patronage societies or corporations of friends of the school who work for the social and industrial welfare of the pupils. These societies tend more and more to assimilate with those of associations of former pupils known as les petites Amicales. The latter, which number now about 5,500, have both recreative and economic purposes.

I shall never forget an illustration of their spirit which I saw in a public school for boys in one of the poorest districts of Paris. The director humbly apologized for the shabby building, "the meanest," he said, "in the city." Altho scrupulously clean, it was indeed old, inconvenient and crowded, but I recall the beaming countenance of the director as we stood in the covered play court, and he showed me there a little stage fitted up with the essential properties, and furnished with a scenic curtain, all provided by the society of former pupils attached to that school. Here, as he explained, they presented from time to time, for the entertainment of the present pupils and their friends, very fetching French plays and charming concerts.

Above all, the schools are the centers of that wonderful propaganda of popular intelligence which seeks to keep alive in the adult masses of France the passion for "the good, the beautiful, and the true." This work comprises lectures, popular and instructive; courses of lessons in civics, or the rights and duties of citizens; in economics, applied to the conditions of ordinary life; in industrial science, i. e., agricultural and mechanic, and for women, lessons in household thrift and arts, and in the local industries accessible to them. For the scientific, historic, and literary courses, syllabi are prepared by eminent professors who have the French art of simplifying the difficult. These outlines are freely distributed thruout the country. Teachers, professors, and patriotic citizens are united in supporting the work. The government gives aid by an annual appropriation, and by the loan of lantern slides and other

illustrative material. It also rewards the teachers who are most zealous in the cause by a much coveted prize.

The aim is to make every school a center of civic life, union, and aspiration. This purpose, however, is not suffered to interfere with the regular routine of the school; for in the French system the professional character of the primary school is most carefully guarded from outside interference and disturbance.

In Protestant countries the public primary school has been called the child of the Reformation; in France it almost seems as if the Reformation was to be the child of the public school, for along with this transfer of the school from social isolation to social assimilation is a noticeable revival of religious consciousness in the church. This revival which, in the opinion of impartial observers, is drawing the French Catholic church to a sympathetic understanding of the Republic, in the Reformed or Protestant church is apparently working toward a deeper sense of the value of institutional life.

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Where the Chicago Kindergarten Institute opens its ninth year of work September 11, 1992.

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