While respecting the legitimate independence of family education, Thiers argued, the State was claiming the rightful responsibility of issuing laws on the education of its citizens. With the university system, the State was trying to make a unified type of formation effective in all institutions, common for all.198 As for the existence of institutions, in order to guarantee the freedom of teaching the commission had bluntly announced the abolition of the previously required authorisation, even though still holding on to certain conditions required for the opening of institutions.199 In a word, the commission was against the preventive system. But, as Thiers immediately clarified, it was self-evident that any departure from the preventive system meant immediate entry into the repressive system. When freedom is granted, the need for supervision follows. This supervision was needed to safeguard the quality of instruction, morality and the respect for the institution.200
University inspectors would have carried out the legitimate task of “examining, surveying , issuing warnings and using a simple disciplinary censure”. This might have proven to be a beneficial stimulus for both teachers and students and would have been a way of distinguishing good institutions from those not up to par. However, institutions faced with a decree of suppression always had the opportunity for recourse to judicial authority.201
2. Public repressive and private preventive educvation
The meaning of the two terms is inverted when they are transferred from a political debate to a pedagogical issue.
This counter position is first of all made evident in France as the aftermath of the debate on the discipline to be used in schools. According to Philip Aries: “right from the beginning of the 19th century, school discipline had abandoned its liberal tradition and had adopted a barracks-like style”. This was not only due to the impact of the Napoleonic period, but to two more important factors: the pedagogical tradition of the military schools of the ancien régime and the emerging sensitivity to adolescence, taken as the age which lets go of the circumstances of childhood and commences its decisive course towards the adult state. This requires educational measures strongly seasoned with responsibility.202
It is in this climate that the idea of the college (boarding school) was imposed, in order to create a more precise framework for the time of growing up.203
In the 1840s some people in connection with the different regimes used in state boarding schools on one hand and by the family and private Catholic boarding schools on the other, proposed the antithesis between the two pedagogies, the repressive and the preventive, though not without some debate. This is why the liberal Duke de Broglie, during a debate in the Chambers of Equals, on the law regarding secondary schools already mentioned in the preceding paragraph and dated April 22 1844, declared:
Education in the home context is essentially preventive. This is its incomparable merit. Its
main drawback is that it does not always form either talented people or strong characters.
In an atmosphere which is rather artificial and so to say, to all appearances like a hothouse,
it cultivates tender plants which later on can barely withstand the storms coming from the
outside world. … public education is somewhat repressive and, to a certain extent, deals
dans le séance du 13 juillet 1844, (Paris: Paulin Éditeur 1844), 27-39 and 39-49.
198 46 Royal schools and 312 communal colleges were tied to the University. A further 1,016 private educational houses
were subject to supervision. Pupils receiving secondary education numbered 19,000, 27,000, 36,000 respectively. 199 A. Thiers, Rapport, 27-35.
200 ibid, 39.
201 ibid, 44.
202 Cf. Ph. Ariès, L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime, (Paris: Éditions duSeuil 1973), 294-295.
203 ibid. 313-317.