In more exact language it is a mechanical "gaveuse"[6377] in which they are daily crammed; through this constant, forced feeding, their real knowledge is not increased, nor their mental vigor; they are superficially fattened and, at the end of the year, or in eighteen months, they present themselves on the appointed day, with the artificial and momentary volume they need for that day, with the bulk, surface, polish and all the requisite externals, because these externals are the only ones that the examination verifies and imposes.[6378] Less harshly, but in the same manner and with the same object, operate the special education services which, inside our colleges and lycees, prepare young men for the Ecole de Saint-Cyr and for the polytechnic, naval, central, normal, agricultural, commercial and forestry schools; in these too, the studies are cramming machines which prepare the pupil for examination purposes.

In the like manner, above secondary education, all our special schools are public cramming machines;[6379] alongside of them are private schools advertised and puffed in the newspapers and by posters of the walls, preparing young men for the license degree in Law and for the third or fourth examinations in Medicine.

Some day or other, others will probably exist to prepare them for Treasury inspectors, for the "Cour des Comptes," for diplomacy, by competition, the same as for the medical profession, for a hospital surgeon and for aggregation in law, medicine, letters or sciences.
Undoubtedly, some minds, very active and very robust, withstand this regime; all they have been made to swallow is absorbed and digested.
After leaving school and having passed through all grades they preserve the faculty of learning, investigating and inventing intact, and compose the small elite of scholars, litterateurs, artists, engineers and physicians who, in the international exposition of superior talent, maintain France in its ancient rank.[6380]--But the rest, in very great majority, nine out of ten at least, have lost their time and trouble, many years of their life and years that are useful, important and even decisive: take at once one-half or two-thirds of those who present themselves at the examinations, I mean the rejected, and then, among the admitted who get diplomas, another half or two-thirds that is to say, the overworked.

Too much has been required of them by exacting that, on such a day, seated or before the blackboard, for two entire hours, they should be living repertories of all human knowledge; in effect, such they are, or nearly so, that day, for two hours; but, a month later, they are so no longer; they could not undergo the same examination; their acquisitions, too numerous and too burdensome, constantly drop of their minds and they make no new ones.

Their mental vigor has given way, the fecund sap has dried up; the finished man appears, often a finished man content to be put away, to be married, and plod along indefinitely in the same circle, entrenched in his restricted vocation and doing his duty, but nothing more.