ical college it is
twelve hours, and, from the age of twelve years, through the necessity
of being first in competition as well as for securing the greatest
number of admissions through various examinations.--At the end of this
secondary education there is a graduated scale of successive test, and
first the baccalaureat. Fifty out of one hundred candidates fail and
the examiners are indulgent.[6376] This proves, first of all, that the
rejected have profited by their studies; but it likewise proves that the
program of the examination is not adapted to the general run of minds,
nor to the native faculties of the human majority; that many young men
capable of learning by the opposite method learn nothing by this one;
that education, such as it is, with the kind and greatness of the mental
labor it imposes, with its abstract and theoretical style, is beyond
the capacity of the average mind.--Particularly, during the last year
of classical studies, the pupils have had to follow the philosophy
lectures: in the time of M. Laromiquiere, this might be useful to them;
in the time of M. Cousin, the course, so far, did but little harm; at
the present day, impregnated with neo-Kantism, it injects into minds of
eighteen, seventeen, and even sixteen years, a metaphysical muddle as
cumbersome as the scholasticism of the fourteenth century, terribly
indigestible and unhealthy for the stomachs of novices; the swallow
even to bursting and throw it off at the examination just as it comes,
entirely raw for lack of the capacity to assimilate it.--Often, after
failure at the baccalaureat, or on entering the preparatory or Grande
Ecoles, the young people go into, or are put into, what they call "a
box" or an "oven" a preparatory internat, similar to the boxes in which
silkworms are raised and to the ovens where the eggs are hatched. 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 speci