given in this class has for its object the preparation of pupils who have completed the lycée course, and who purpose entering the polytechnic, the superior, or the central schools. None are admitted to this course who have not previously manifested an aptitude for it. The hours of recitation per week are, mathematics eleven hours, descriptive geometry three hours, physics and chemistry five hours, natural history three hours, French language two hours, modern languages two hours, history and geography three hours, and drawing two hours; total, thirty-one hours.
The instruction to-day given in France under the name of l'enseignement secondaire spécial has found a secure footing only after many years of violent discussion and constant opposition. Its career, however, has been steadily advancing and gaining in public consideration ever since its organization in 1865. Its programme was extended and revised in 1881, and in 1886 it was organized on its present basis. The courses of study have been framed with especial reference to the requirements of a large class of pupils of good social position, who have neither the desire, the tastes, nor perhaps the leisure for long years' study of dead languages. It is a response to the needs of a large class for a preparation for actual life in various careers, which the classical courses are incapable of giving. The school is in a sense the Realschule of the French, differing from its German congener, however, by the entire elimination of Latin from its programme. The course comprises six years of study, crowned, at its successful termination, by the diploma of bachelier de l'enseignement secondaire spécial, the possession of which entitles the holder to admission to the examinations for the baccalauréat ès sciences, for the military school of Saint-Cyr, and, with the exception of the Polytechnic School, which still holds to its classical requirements, to other national schools with requirements of a general similar character.
However interesting, as an illustration of French school methods, the curriculum of the secondary special schools may be, the severity of the course, as a whole, renders it unlikely that it will ever be very closely imitated in this country. The recitations here range from twenty-five to twenty-nine hours per week, giving, for the whole course, 6,360 hours, against 4,36012 hours in the American representative of the same type of school.[1] The official
- ↑ As the secondary special schools of France occupy about the same place in the French system as the upper classes of grammar schools and the English high schools occupy in ours, the French programmes of these schools have been brought by the writer into comparison with a typical American school—the courses of the two upper classes of the grammar schools and those of the English High School of Boston being employed as a fair American representative.
