CHAPTER I.

DEVELOPMENT OF SECONDARY INSTRUCTION IN EUROPE.

ORIGIN OF OUR PRESENT SECONDARY SCHOOLS-THEIR DEVELOPMENT BEST TRACED IN FRANCE-ROMAN PERIOD-MEDIEVAL PERIOD-UNIVERSITY OF PARIS CREATION OF COLLEGES THE INSTRUCTION IN THE MEDIEVAL SCHOOLS-THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS AND THE RENAISSANCE-SCHOOLS OF THE JESUITS THE OLD

SCHOOLS ABOLISHED AT THE REVOLUTION-NEW PLANS-FOURCROY'S LAW (1802).

POPULAR EDUCATION has sprung out of the ideas and

necessities of modern times, and the elementary school for the poor is an institution which has no remote history. With the secondary school it is otherwise. The secondary school has a long history; through a series of changes it goes back, in every European country, to the beginnings of civilised society in that country; from the time when this society had any sort of organisation, a certain sort of schools and schooling existed, and between that schooling and the schooling which the children of the richer class of society at this day receive there is an unbroken connection. In no country is this continuity of secondary instruction more visible than in France, notwithstanding her revolutions; and in some respects France, in that which concerns the historical development of secondary instruction, is a typical country. All the countries of western Europe had their early contact with Greek and Roman civilisation, a contact from which their actual books and schools and science begin; France had this more than any of them, except Italy. All the countries of western Europe had in the feudal and catholic Middle Age their universities, under whose wings were hatched the colleges and teachers that formed the germ of our actual secondary instruction; and the great Middle Age university was the University of Paris. Hither repaired the students

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of other countries and other universities, as to the main centre of mediæval science, and the most authoritative school of medieval teaching. It received names expressing the most enthusiastic devotion: the fountain of knowledge, the tree of life, the candlestick of the house of the Lord. The most famous University of Paris, the place at this time and long before whither the English, and mostly the Oxonians, resorted,' says Wood. Tandem fiat hic velut Parisiis . . . ad instar Parisiensis studii quemadmodum in Parisiensi studio. say the rules of the University of Vienna, founded in 1365. Here came Roger Bacon, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Dante; here studied the founder of the first university of the Empire, Charles the Fourth, Emperor of Germany and King of Bohemia, founder of the University of Prague; * here Henry the Second in the 12th century proposed to refer his dispute with Becket; here, in the 14th, the schism in the papacy and the claims of the rival popes were brought for judgment. In Europe and Asia, in foreign cities and on battle fields, among statesmen, princes, priests, crusaders, scholars, passed in the middle ages this word of recognition, Nos fuimus simul in Galandia,—the Rue de Galande, one of the streets of the old university quarter, the quartier latin of Paris.

The countries of western Europe, leavened, all of them, by the one spirit of the feudal and catholic Middle Age, formed in some sense one community, and were more associated than they have been since the feudal and catholic unity of the Middle Age has disappeared and given place to the divided and various life of modern Europe. In the mediæval community France held the first place. It is now well known that to place in the 15th century the revival of intellectual life and the re-establishment of civilisation, and to treat the period between the 5th century, when ancient civilisation was ruined by the barbarians, and the 15th, when the life and intellect of this civilisation reappeared and transformed the world, as one chaos, is a mistake. The chaos ends about the 10th century; in the 11th there truly comes the first re

Founded 1348.

establishment of civilisation, the first revival of intellectual life; the principal centre of this revival is France, its chief monuments of literature are in the French language, its chief monuments of art are the French cathedrals. This revival fills the 12th and 13th centuries with its activity and with its works; all this time France has the lead; in the 14th century the lead passes to Italy; but now comes the commencement of a wholly new period, the period of the Renaissance properly so called, the beginning of modern European life, the ceasing of the life of the feudal and catholic Middle Age. The anterior and less glorious Renaissance, the Renaissance within the limits of the Middle Age itself, a revival which came to a stop and could not successfully develope itself, but which has yet left profound traces in our spirit and our literature, this revival belongs chiefly to France. France, then, may well serve as a typical country wherein to trace the medieval growth of intellect and learning; above all she may so stand for us, whose connection with her in the Middle Age, owing to our Norman kings and the currency of her language among our cultivated class, was so peculiarly close; so close that the literary and intellectual development of the two countries at that time intermingles, and no important event can happen in that of the one without straightway affecting and interesting that of the other. As late as the year 1328 we find French an alternative language, at Oxford, with Latin; the students are to use colloquio Latino vel saltem Gallico. With the hostility of the long French Wars of Edward the Third comes the estrangement, never afterwards diminishing but always increasing. To this day it is impossible to read the French literature of the true Middle Age without feeling that here is the moment when the life of the French nation comes really closest to our own; thought and expression have both of them much which we recognise as akin to us, which we have in a great degree retained, while the French have gone away from it to a thought and expression more effective no doubt for many purposes, but more unlike ours. To show how this is the case with thought and style would need more space than I have here at command; one example out of a thousand,-the word rescouer, for

instance, to rescue,' which the French had in the Middle Age, which we have still, but which the French have no longer, will show how it is the case with language.

Roman civilisation in Gaul, as in other parts of the empire, organised a system of schools. Before the ruin of that civilisation in the fourth century, there were great schools in important towns, Vienne, Lyons, Bordeaux, Arles, Agen, Clermont, Perigueux; and at these schools, Christian children began to appear. Then came the invasions of the barbarians, and the break-up of the old order of things. For some time schooling ceased to be a concern of lay society; it went on in the shelter of the church and for the benefit of the ecclesiastical body. The great schools from the 4th century to the 12th are the monastery schools, such as the school of Saint Victor at Marseilles, of Lérins in the isles of Hyères, of Saint Claude in Franche Comté, of Saint Médard at Soissons. There were 400 monks studying at the school of Saint Médard in the sixth century. A famous monastery school for women also, that of Chelles near Paris, existed as early as the time of the Merovingian kings. But as a new state of society gradually formed itself and became solid, signs appeared of the lay class too coming to school. A decree of Pope Eugene II., in 826, ordered that in universis episcopiis subjectisque plebibus et aliis locis in quibus necessitas occurrerit, omnino cura et diligentia adhibeatur ut magistri et doctores constituantur, qui studia literarum, liberaliumque artium dogmata, assidue doceant. The Council of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 816, had divided the school into interior and exterior; the first for novices in training for the Church, the second for lay boys. In 855 this arrangement was carried into effect at Fleury sur Loire, one of the schools which Theodulf, Bishop of Orleans, employed by Charlemagne in his plans of social reconstruction, had founded. At Fleury sur Loire was formed a school expressly for the sons of laymen, the youth of the upper class; it was called Hospitale Nobilium. The Palace School of Charlemagne is well known. Charlemagne's astonishing efforts at reconstruction were, however, premature; after his death followed another period of confusion and slow formation. But about the 11th century we see

feudal society, with institutions naturally developed and destined to endure for a long while, in possession of France, England, and Germany. From about the 11th century, date the beginnings of an instruction which has, with many changes of names, impulses, and objects, been going on uninterruptedly ever since.

Our Stephen Harding, the third abbot of Citeaux, and the true founder of the great order of the Cistercians, was studying at the School of Paris in 1070. The name of Abelard recalls the European celebrity and immense intellectual ferment of this school in the 12th century. But it was in the first year of the following century, the 13th, that it received a charter from Philip Augustus, and thenceforth the name of University of Paris takes the place of that of School of Paris. Forty-nine years later was founded University College, Oxford, the oldest college of the oldest English University. Four nations composed the University of Paris,-the nation of France, the nation of Picardy, the nation of Normandy, and (signal mark of the close intercourse which then existed between France and us!) the nation of England.* The four nations united formed the faculty of arts. The faculty of theology was created in 1257, that of law in 1271, that of medicine in 1274. Theology, law, and medicine had each their Dean; arts had four Procurators, one for each of the four nations composing this faculty. Arts elected the rector of the University, and had possession of the University chest and archives:

The pre-eminence of the Faculty of Arts indicates, as indeed does the very development of the University, an idea, gradually strengthening itself, of a lay instruction to be no longer absorbed in theology, but separable from it. The growth of a lay and modern spirit in society, the preponderance of the crown over the papacy, of the civil over the ecclesiastical power, is the great feature of French history

* Another mark of this close intercourse is the choice of a patron by the nation of France; this patron was Saint Thomas of Canterbury. That of the nation of England was Saint Edmund, the Saxon martyr-king. In the 15th century, when the Hundred Years' War had separated France and England, the nation of Germany took the place of ours, and Saint Charlemagne took that of Saint Edmund. In 1661 Charlemagne was made by statute the common patron of the University.