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 The task of educational reform imposed itself upon the republic by a twofold necessity. The wars of 1866 and 1870 were victories for the Prussian schoolmaster, and aroused all western Europe to the national importance of popular education. For France then the reform of popular education was an essential part of the work of national restoration. For the republic too, menaced by older and hostile traditions, the creation of a national system of education inspired by its own spirit was an essential condition of the permanence and security of its government and the social ideals of which that government was the expression. Hence the energy with which the republican state addressed itself to the organization of primary instruction, “obligatory, gratuitous, secular.”

By the law of June 1, 1878, there was imposed upon the communes the obligation of acquiring their school buildings; and as a grant in aid a sum of £2,400,000 was set aside for this purpose by the state. In 1879 a law was passed compelling every department to maintain a training college for male and female teachers respectively. The two higher normal schools of Fontenay and St Cloud were also founded to supply the training colleges with professors. During the same period, among other certificats or professional diplomas, there were established the certificat d’aptitude pédagogique, which qualifies probationer-teachers (stagiaires) for appointment as teachers in full standing (titulaires), and the certificat d’aptitude for primary inspectors and heads of normal schools. The law of June 16, 1881, rendered obligatory for all teachers, whether public or private, the brevet de capacité. It was found impracticable to carry this law into immediate effect, and as late as 1902 only about 60% of the men and 52% of the women were provided with the professional certificate necessary for becoming titulaires.

The laws making primary education gratuitous, compulsory and secular, are indissolubly associated with the name of Jules Ferry. The law of June 16, 1881, abolished fees in all primary schools and training colleges, the law of 1882 established compulsory attendance, and finally the law of October 30, 1886, enacted that none but lay persons should teach in the public schools, and abolished in those schools all distinctively religious teaching. In the boys’ schools members of religious communities were to be displaced within five years, but in girls’ schools the religieuses might remain till death or resignation.

Religious teaching was replaced in the state schools under the Ferry law by moral instruction according to official curricula, a change which has been described by M. Séailles (Éducation ou révolution) as a revolution of the profoundest philosophical meaning. The difficult and delicate topics of the relation of the state school to religion and the value of the substituted moral instruction have recently received illuminating and objective treatment from different points of view in the series of reports on Moral Instruction and Training in Schools, edited by Professor M. E. Sadler (1908, vol. ii.); the barest reference to the questions at issue must here suffice. As regards the character of the moral instruction, it would appear to have shifted from a Kantian to a purely sociological basis. Roman Catholic opinion is at least not unanimous in regarding the “lay” or neutral school as essentially or necessarily anti-religious, and plainly there is no inherent reason why the neutrality should not be a real neutrality, but with the existing relations between the Catholic Church and modern thought in France the influence of the Normalist teachers is in fact apt to be anti-religious, and moreover no system of independent moral doctrine, whether based upon a priori or inductive reasoning, can be acceptable to the Roman Catholic Church. In whatever degree the blame may be rightly apportionable between church and state, the fact is that the two find themselves in acute conflict, and that from the conflict there has resulted a certain moral confusion which Christian and non-Christian moralists alike view with alarm. It may be that the mischief would have been mitigated had more moderate counsels prevailed at the time of the Ferry law, and had the church been willing to accept (as the Republic might then have been willing to concede) right of entry for the clergy into the schools. But the real causes of the trouble lie deep in the philosophical and religious problems of our time, and in the constant and self-sacrificing devotion of the French to logical ideals on either side. Perhaps it is not too sanguine to discern in the growing tendency to idealism in French philosophy, and to liberal ideas in French and Catholic religious thought, the promise of a happier state of things. In the meantime, the religious difficulty in the schools divides the nation into two hostile camps (les deux Frances, as a Swiss Protestant writer puts it) in the shape of the state secular schools on the one side and the private religious schools on the other.

In the year 1903–1904 the total number of pupils in private primary schools was 1,298,591, as against 4,935,000 in the public primary schools, but these figures were liable to be materially affected by the rigorous enforcement of the laws against the religious orders.

In 1889 an important change was made in educational finance by transferring the cost of teachers’ salaries in primary schools from the communes to the state, a right consequence of the changes which made the teacher a state official. Thus the state assumed the greater part of the burden of primary instruction, leaving to the communes merely the cost of fabric, and to the department the maintenance of the fabric of the normal schools and certain expenses of inspection.

At this point it will be convenient to describe shortly the various central and local authorities that constitute the official machine. The minister, the head of the entire hierarchy, is assisted by a conseil supérieur consisting of fifty-seven members, of whom the majority are elected by the higher teaching profession, while a few are nominated by the president, including a small number to represent private schools, and a few are elected by the primary teachers. Practically the ordinary work of the council is carried on by a sub-committee consisting of the nine nominees of the president and six others designated for this purpose by the minister. The council has administrative, judicial and disciplinary, as well as advisory, powers which enable it to exert a direct influence upon the internal organization of schools. There is also a pedagogic comité consultatif and a legal comité contentieux, whose respective functions are purely advisory.

The inspecteurs généraux “act,” says Mr Brereton in his official report to the English Board of Education, “as the eyes and ears of the central authority.” Their duties are: first to inspect the normal schools; next to supervise the work of the ordinary inspectorate; lastly to give general and comparative information on the progress of primary instruction in the various parts of France. For the purpose of general inspection France is divided into seven districts.

As already indicated, for the purpose of educational administration, the departments of France are grouped in seventeen divisions called academies. At the head of each academy is the rector. He is appointed directly by the president and must hold the doctor’s degree. He is not only the head of the local teaching university, but is also charged in a general way with the oversight of all three departments of education, superior, secondary and primary; in regard to the last, however, his functions are confined to the pedagogic side. The direct share of the rector in administration is mainly confined to the normal schools and the higher primary schools. The rector is assisted by an academic council composed almost exclusively of pedagogic elements.

Each department of France has an academy inspector appointed by the minister. The duties of the academy inspector embrace both higher and primary education. In the latter sphere he is the real head of the local administration, and the primary inspectors are his subordinate officers. He appoints the probationer-teachers and nominates the regular teachers for appointment by the préfet.