Savannah courier. (Savannah, Tenn.) 1885-1979, 1886-11-25
FREE PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
Matthew Arnold's Views on Those of Ger.
many, France and Switzerland.

many france anu SWltLtrlhnus
The privileges of popular education
have been so long enjoyed in this coun-
try as part of our system of govern
ment that they are accepted with as lit
tie thought as the air we breathe. 1t is
difficult to understand that in England
the free public school, as we have it
here, not only does not exist, but its es-
Enlistment is advocated by only few,
and then with extreme timidity. Under
the last Tory administration Mr.. Mat
thew Arnold was designated to make a
study of the free-school system Of the
Continent. He devoted four months to
investigation, and now, the Govern
ment in the meantime having twice
changed hands, his report is printed
The countries which have a free-school
system are Germany, Switzerland and
France. In the first-named, although
the law prescribes free education, it is
only in Berlin and a few other
favored districts that the authors
ties can afford to comply with
the law. Mr.. Arnold, however.
found the Minister of Education warmly
in favor of making the schools free in
practice as they are in theory, and Bis
marck is of the same way of thinking,
affirming that ''free schooling is par
ticularly safe and useful form of public
aid to the working classes"
Mr.. Arnold finds that the free schools
in Switzerland resemble those of the
United States in this particular, that, in
stead of being established by political
or governing class for the benefit of the
lower classes, they are established by
the community for its own benefit. A
rich man at Zurich, the largest em-
ployer of labor in Switzerland, sends
his own children, girls and boys, with
out hesitation, to the public school; and
this equality of conditions generally
prevails. Education is free and COM
pulsory, and rests for support on munich
pal taxation. In France, when Mr.. Ar
mold asked what motive prompted the
establishment of the great gratuitous
system of public education, he was told
''the democratic idea," by which was
meant the desirability of abolishing all
distinction between the child who could
afford to pay fees for his schooling and
the child who could not. But the un-
UNCONVENTIONAL, anti-commercial idea
is equally operative. Mr.. Arnold bears
testimony to the excellence of the
training schools, especially those al
Antuil and Fontenoy, and instances
with particular praise the master of the
latter, the lessons of pedagogy in whose
hands became really mora
and religious, and yet neither Catholic
nor Protestant" In general Mr.. Ar
mold found the moral and civic instruc
ton which is now substituted through
out the French schools for direct reli
gious instruction of little or no value
In Paris the municipality not only
] provides free schools but free books, fret
materials and in some cases free din.
ners. In connection with all the IN
fants' schools and primary schools there
is established a system of penny dinners
and it is arule that to all children reall,
poor the dinners shall be given free
Mr.. Arnold says that he saw no groups
of children who could be called dirt,
and neglected, the arrangement mad
for cheap or free dinners enabling tn
parents to send their children decent,
dressed The Pail Mall Gazette suggest
that the spectacle of the municipality o
Paris spending its money on dinner
and books for poor children is perhap
more humane and even more religion
than that of the corporation of Londol
presenting gold caskets to Princes o
guzzling away fortune in public ban
quets. Boston Transcript.