The One-School System

Until now, it seems to have been accepted as normal that poor children are entitled to only a rudimentary education, sufficient for their social status, while wealthy children, heirs to a bourgeoisie attached to the privileges of management and authority, need a more general and refined culture. What an aberration, and how many sources of energy have thus remained untapped!
A regime is the outward form of a collective state of mind. What constitutes the essence of a Republic is the critical spirit and the feeling of equality. Therefore, education must be secular and organized in a democratic manner.
Education must be traced back to the laws of nature; it must be drawn from the sources of thought and reason. What morality, one might object, can be found there? This eternal morality, of which Mr. Ferdinand Buisson is accustomed to speaking so eloquently, is independent of all religious denominations and all metaphysical conceptions, and is found at the heart of all civilizations.
Its modern form has been discredited by declaring it to be of German, Kantian origin.
On the contrary, it is eminently French. It was developed by that line of great thinkers who, starting with Rabelais and arriving at Rousseau, by way of Montaigne, Molière, La Fontaine, Fontenelle, and all the "philosophes" of the eighteenth century, drew from their meditations on human nature and the conditions for its perfection, principles of action which, while essentially rational, were nonetheless capable of inspiring the authors of the French Revolution with sublime enthusiasm.
In reality, what are we getting at? To have it accepted that there is only one morality, religious morality, and only one educator, the priest. "It is said that to teachers the formation of minds; to the clergy the formation of souls"; and here is the priest in public schools. To this we respond with all our might: the priest in the church, or... in school... never!
To fight for a comprehensive school system, we must battle formidable resistance, but we will still overcome it.
We must, above all, keep intact the achievements of secularism, but that is not enough; we must undertake the normal achievement of the most absolute equality in education.
Public education must be organized democratically. At the base, primary schools must be opened, the comprehensive school system. All children without exception, rich or poor, imbued with metaphysical conceptions or not, must attend it compulsorily and free of charge. In this school, minds will no longer be weary of encyclopedic and indigestible knowledge. Souls will be awakened and robust bodies will be formed. In the village or neighborhood school, in the cities, the day when its mission is to prepare the entire impulse of French youth toward the highest hopes and the noblest ambitions, primary education will no longer be an end, but a stage, the first. It will complete nothing, but it will usefully prepare. It will shape in the child! At the same time as the physical being, the still formless moral being, it will fix indecisive thought and guide disordered sensitivity. It will revive his native curiosity, maintain his enthusiasms and discipline his emotions. The teacher will no longer be a mechanical preacher, but a "searcher of sources." When the child leaves this center of intense and moral life, he will be able to turn to life with different hopes than he has had until now, towards rigorous study where all branches will be open to his finally awakened activity. The transition from this first level to this or that branch of the second level and, if necessary, to this or that part of higher education, must then be made according to natural aptitude and work and not according to wealth and personal circumstances. The principle of selection necessarily entails that of free education. One day, as soon as possible, schools must cost nothing, neither at the Lycée, nor at the technical school, nor at the Faculty, with the State substituting for needy families for all maintenance costs.

Until this ideal is fully realized, every specific reform must be inspired by it.

Simon REYNAUD, MP for the Loire.