Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/143

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  • unates, and, like them, the slave of the very

worst possible system of education.

M. Demolins complains that the French rely too much on stiff examinations as a test of knowledge, and a French youth writes me on this subject: "We have a great many schools in France; as many as there are professions, since nobody who has not spent two or three years in some sort of school, and undergone innumerable examinations, can hope to do anything. For instance, I have undergone nine examinations, and it is not even over! Naturally, I only refer to necessary examinations. They begin at the age of fifteen or sixteen. Before that period you must have been at a lycée or college. A lycée is a government establishment, and a college belongs to its township. The training is identical, but the college professors are less well paid. Their inferiority to the lycée professors lies in the fact that they have not undergone so many examinations as these, or, perhaps, only have come out of them less successfully. In the lycées and colleges there are two methods—the literary or old method, and the scientific or new one. The old method is general: literature, geography, history, German or English (never both), Latin, Greek, mathematics, every year; in the first years only zoölogy, botany, and geology, and in the last years philosophy. But always the most important