ABSTRACT
Today it is taken as self-evident, a truth recognised by everyone, that the structures within which academic life is developed ought to vary according to the age and the degree of intellectual development which the pupil has attained. When the pupil has become a young man, already furnished with a basic education, he has already developed a certain self-awareness in the course of a preliminary education in which he has got to know himself. The academic organisation which he enters in order to further his education needs to be sufficiently flexible to allow him to move within it with considerable freedom, to seek himself independently; courses must be offered to him, not imposed upon him; he must be able to choose according to the self-knowledge he has acquired and developed regarding his needs and his aspirations. The moment has come to render his apprenticeship to life even more direct; consequently it is no longer possible to subject him to an over-solicitous supervision, to a tutelage which is excessively restricted. It is this need which is met today in slightly different forms by the organisations of universities in all European countries. At an earlier age, when the pupil is still only a child or an adolescent, when he still lacks sufficient experience to be able to be left to his own devices amongst the world of people and things, when he is still very unsure of his emerging individuality, it is essential that he be subjected to a regime which is more impersonal, to a type of control which is more direct. The moral environment in which the child lives must enwrap him more closely in order to be able to sustain him effectively. It is on the basis of this principle that the organisation of secondary schools is founded. Now, especially in France, not only during the Middle Ages, but also during the succeeding centuries, it is remarkable that we nowhere meet these two different types of organisation, these two academic systems functioning side by side as they do today. The entire scene is always dominated by one or the other of them, as if they did not both have their special place and their special function. Originally the very young pupil of the arts faculty lived the free life of the University, despite his extreme youth. Later, by contrast, when the colleges appear, the reverse takes place and the student (in the strict sense of the term — the candidate for a master’s degree no less than the child learning elementary grammar) comes to cloister himself and live in these new establishments which henceforth become the sole educational structure throughout the system from the most elementary level to the most elevated. At the end of the last lecture I had begun expounding this great revolution; but we must revert to it because of the repercussions which it has had on the whole of our history.
