Page 9 - To Dragma November 1924

TO DRAGMA OF ALPHA OMICRON PI 5

FRENCH EDUCATION

I T is RATHER difficult for Americans to conjure up an adequate
notion of what the life of the French girl in a lycee is. I f
they have known anything of American parochial schools, they
might imagine that the lycee afforded a cloistered existence, and
they should not be very f a r wrong. The French lycee combines
frugality and discipline, and demands mental exertion such as
we rarely find encouraged in any American school. The French
child enters the kindergarten of the lycee at a very early age, i f
his parents can afford to pay the tuition of the state-subsidized
school; otherwise, he must attend the public schools, which means
that he belongs to the lowest twenty-fifth percentage of the popu-
lation economically.

There exist two parallel systems of education in France; the
one public, and free, and the other subsidized by the government,
and demanding a slight tuitional fee f r o m students. These two
systems never overlap, and teachers that teach i n the public
schools have been also educated in the public system. For ex-
ample, a girl beginning i n an "ecole publique," and showing signs
of superiority, will probably want to teach—her parents will not
be able to provide her with an adequate dowry to insure a satis-
factory marriage. By a system of scholarships she completes her
very rigid professional training in an "ecole normale," along
with fifty or sixty other girls who all hold similar government
scholarships. I f she passes her examinations successfully, she is
qualified to teach in an "ecole primaire." On the other hand, the
girl that follows the lycee training conies f r o m a different social
milieu. She may or may not discontinue her work in the fourth
or the fifth f o r m a year or two before she obtains the first part
of her "Baccalaureat." The urge for obtaining a bachelor's
degree is not so great as i n America where it is more or less the
accepted thing to do. However, i f she does want her degree, it
involves more independent and closely analytical work than our
average graduate student ordinarily puts into his work. A f t e r
completing the fifth form satisfactorily, she is ready to take her
written and oral examinations at the Sorbonne. About seven hun-
dred others will attempt these examinations, and perhaps only two
hundred will be accepted. She must have information at her
fingers' ends on all details of history, geography, philosophy,
French and English literatures, trigonometry, chemistry, and