It is evidently too late to retrace our steps.Experience alone, that supreme educator of peoples, will be at pains to show us our mistake.It alone will be powerful enough to prove the necessity of replacing our odious text-books and our pitiable examinations by industrial instruction capable of inducing our young men to return to the fields, to the workshop, and to the colonial enterprise which they avoid to-day at all costs.
The professional instruction which all enlightened minds are now demanding was the instruction received in the past by our forefathers.It is still in vigour at the present day among the nations who rule the world by their force of will, their initiative, and their spirit of enterprise.In a series of remarkable pages, whose principal passages I reproduce further on, a great thinker, M.Taine, has clearly shown that our former system of education was approximately that in vogue to-day in England and America, and in a remarkable parallel between the Latin and Anglo-Saxon systems he has plainly pointed out the consequences of the two methods.
One might consent, perhaps, at a pinch, to continue to accept all the disadvantages of our classical education, although it produced nothing but discontented men, and men unfitted for their station in life, did the superficial acquisition of so much knowledge, the faultless repeating by heart of so many text-books, raise the level of intelligence.But does it really raise this level? Alas, no! The conditions of success in life are the possession of judgment, experience, initiative, and character--qualities which are not bestowed by books.Books are dictionaries, which it is useful to consult, but of which it is perfectly useless to have lengthy portions in one's head.
How is it possible for professional instruction to develop the intelligence in a measure quite beyond the reach of classical instruction? This has been well shown by M.Taine.
"Ideas, he says, are only formed in their natural and normal surroundings; the promotion of the growth is effected by the innumerable impressions appealing to the senses which a young man receives daily in the workshop, the mine, the law court, the study, the builder's yard, the hospital; at the sight of tools, materials, and operations; in the presence of customers, workers, and labour, of work well or ill done, costly or lucrative.In such a way are obtained those trifling perceptions of detail of the eyes, the ear, the hands, and even the sense of smell, which, picked up involuntarily, and silently elaborated, take shape within the learner, and suggest to him sooner or, later this or that new combination, simplification, economy, improvement, or invention.The young Frenchman is deprived, and precisely at the age when they are most fruitful, of all these precious contacts, of all these indispensable elements of assimilation.For seven or eight years on end he is shut up in a school, and is cut off from that direct personal experience which would give him a keen and exact notion of men and things and of the various ways of handling them.""...At least nine out of ten have wasted their time and pains during several years of their life--telling, important, even decisive years.Among such are to be counted, first of all, the half or two-thirds of those who present themselves for examination--I refer to those who are rejected; and then among those who are successful, who obtain a degree, a certificate, a diploma, there is still a half or two-thirds--I refer to the overworked.Too much has been demanded of them by exacting that on a given day, on a chair or before a board, they should, for two hours in succession, and with respect to a group of sciences, be living repertories of all human knowledge.In point of fact they were that, or nearly so, for two hours on that particular day, but a month later they are so no longer.They could not go through the examination again.Their too numerous and too burdensome acquisitions slip incessantly from their mind, and are not replaced.Their mental vigour has declined, their fertile capacity for growth has dried up, the fully-developed man appears, and he is often a used-up man.Settled down, married, resigned to turning in a circle, and indefinitely in the same circle, he shuts himself up in his confined function, which he fulfils adequately, but nothing more.Such is the average yield:
assuredly the receipts do not balance the expenditure.In England or America, where, as in France previous to 1789, the contrary proceeding is adopted, the outcome obtained is equal or superior."The illustrious psychologist subsequently shows us the difference between our system and that of the Anglo-Saxons.The latter do not possess our innumerable special schools.With them instruction is not based on book-learning, but on object lessons.
The engineer, for example, is trained in a workshop, and never at a school; a method which allows of each individual reaching the level his intelligence permits of.He becomes a workman or a foreman if he can get no further, an engineer if his aptitudes take him as far.This manner of proceeding is much more democratic and of much greater benefit to society than that of making the whole career of an individual depend on an examination, lasting a few hours, and undergone at the age of nineteen or twenty.
