The holders of State scholarships bring with them "habits fashioned out of a bad education," or by the ignorance of almost no education at all,[6115] so that "for a child that is well born and well brought up," their companionship is lopsided and their contact as harmful as it is repulsive.

Consequently, the lycees during the first years,[6116] solely filled with the few holders of scholarships, remain deserted or scarcely occupied, whilst "the elite of the young crowd into more or less expensive private schools." This elite of which the University is thus robbed must be got back.
Since the young do not attend the lycee because they like it, they must come through necessity; to this end, other issues are rendered difficult and several are entirely barred; and better still, all those that are tolerated are made to converge to one sole central outlet, a university establishment, in such a way that the director of each private school, changed from a rival into a purveyor, serves the university instead of injuring it and gives it pupils instead of taking them away.

In the first place, his high standard of instruction is limited;[6117] even in the country and in the towns that have neither lycee nor college, he must teach nothing above a fixed degree; if he is the principal of an institution, this degree must not go beyond the class of the humanities; he must leave to the faculties of the State their domain intact, differential calculus, astronomy, geology, natural history and superior literature.

If he is the master of a boarding-school, this degree must not extend beyond grammar classes, nor the first elements of geometry and arithmetic; he must leave to State lycees and colleges their domain intact, the humanities properly so called, superior lectures and means of secondary instruction .-- In the second place, in the towns possessing a lycee or college, he must teach at home only what the University leaves untaught;[6118] he is not deprived, indeed, of the younger boys; he may still instruct and keep them; but he must conduct all his pupils over ten years of age to the college or lycee, where they will regularly follow the classes as day-scholars.

Consequently, daily and twice a day, he marches them to and fro between his house and the university establishment; before going, in the intermission, and after the class is dismissed he examines them in the lesson they have received out of his house; apart from that, he lodges and feeds them, his office being reduced to this.