CHAPTER I.PUBLIC INSTRUCTION.
I.Public instruction and its three effects.
Public instruction and its three effects .-- Influences of the master, of the pupils on each other, and of discipline.
-- Case in which all three tend towards producing a particular type of man.
AT fixed intervals a man, in a room, gathers around him children, youths, a group of young people, ten, twenty, thirty or more; he talks to them for one or two hours and they listen to him.

They sit alongside of each other, look in each other's faces, touch each other's elbows, feel that they are class-mates, of the same age and occupied with the same tasks.

They form a society and in two ways, one with another and all with the master.

Hence they live under a statute: every society has one of its own, spontaneous or imposed on it; as soon as men, little or big, come together in any number, in a drawing-room, in a cafe, in the street, they find themselves subject to a local charter, a sort of code which prescribes to them, or interdicts a certain sort of conduct.

And so with the school: positive rules along with many tacit rules are here observed and these form a mould which stamps on minds and souls a lasting imprint.