al education services which, inside our colleges and lycees,
prepare young men for the Ecole de Saint-Cyr and for the polytechnic,
naval, central, normal, agricultural, commercial and forestry schools;
in these too, the studies are cramming machines which prepare the pupil
for examination purposes. In the like manner, above secondary education,
all our special schools are public cramming machines;[6379] alongside of
them are private schools advertised and puffed in the newspapers and by
posters of the walls, preparing young men for the license degree in Law
and for the third or fourth examinations in Medicine. Some day or other,
others will probably exist to prepare them for Treasury inspectors, for
the "Cour des Comptes," for diplomacy, by competition, the same as for
the medical profession, for a hospital surgeon and for aggregation in
law, medicine, letters or sciences.

Undoubtedly, some minds, very active and very robust, withstand this
regime; all they have been made to swallow is absorbed and digested.
After leaving school and having passed through all grades they preserve
the faculty of learning, investigating and inventing intact, and compose
the small elite of scholars, litterateurs, artists, engineers and
physicians who, in the international exposition of superior talent,
maintain France in its ancient rank.[6380]--But the rest, in very great
majority, nine out of ten at least, have lost their time and trouble,
many years of their life and years that are useful, important and even
decisive: take at once one-half or two-thirds of those who present
themselves at the examinations, I mean the rejected, and then, among the
admitted who get diplomas, another half or two-thirds that is to say,
the overworked. Too much has been required of them by exacting that, on
such a day, seated or before the blackboard, for two entire hours, they
should be living repertories of all human knowledge; in effect, such
they are, or nearly so, that day, for two hours; but, a month later,
they are so no longer; they could not undergo the same examination;
their acquisitions, too numerous and too burdensome, constantly drop of
their minds and they make no new ones. Their mental vigor has given way,
the fecund sap has dried up; the finished man appears, often a finished
man content to be put away, to be married, and plod along indefinitely
in the same circle, entrenched in his restricted vocation and doing his
duty, but nothing more. Suc