[The Origins of Contemporary France Volume 6 (of 6) by Hippolyte A. Taine]@TWC D-Link bookThe Origins of Contemporary France Volume 6 (of 6) CHAPTER III 54/92
To direct, inspect, augment and diffuse its primary instruction, the State has maintained 173 normal schools for teachers, male and female, 736 schools and courses of lectures in primary, superior and professional instruction, 66,784 elementary schools, 3,597 maternal schools, and about 115,000 functionaries, men and women.[63105] Through these 115,000 officials, representatives and megaphones, Secular Reason, which is enthroned at Paris, sends its voice even to the smallest and most remote villages.
It is this Reason, as our rulers define it, with the inclinations, limitations and prejudices they have need of, the near-sighted and half-domesticated grand-daughter of that other formidable sightless, brutal and mad grandmother, who, in 1793 and 1794, sat under the same name and in the same place.
With less of violence and blundering, but by virtue of the same instinct and with the same one-sidedness, the latter employs the same propaganda.
She too wants to seize the new generations, and through her programs and manuals, her insinuations and summaries of the Ancient Regime, the Revolution and the Empire, by her perceptions of recent or contemporary matters, through her formulae and suggestions in relation to moral, social and political affairs, it is of her and she alone, that she preaches and glorifies. VI.
Summary. Total and actual effect of the system .-- Increasing unsuitableness between early education and adult life. -- Change for the worse in the mental and moral balance of contemporary youth. In this manner does the education by the State end.
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