Let it be clearly understood, however, that we
are not speaking of this school with more
knowledge about it than could be got from its report
upon itself, addressed to M. Eugène Rendu, and
published lately in the Constitutionnel. We tell
only what is planned. It may be great cry and
little wool, but the cry is not a bad one, and in
echoing it we take for granted that no Englishman
will send a son to the international school of
St. Germain-en-Laye without first going to the
place and seeing for himself how far it keeps the
promise of its founders.

The . manager, M. Jules Brandt, reports that
a thorough teaching of Latin and Greek belongs
to the plan, but that to be thorough it should be
preceded by full primary instruction, and that if
the classical studies be thus entered upon when
the mind of the learner is ripe for them, they
will be acquired more rapidly and thoroughly
than usual, and this with enjoyment. Two hours
a day are given to the language and literature of
the country of the school, and prominence is
given, as in Germany, to the study of instrumental
music and singing. It is part, also, of
the design that no teacher shall have more than
twenty pupils under his charge.

An international school, according to the
design here sketched, would contain pupils not
only of different countries, but also of different
creeds. While the religious care of each little
community is left to its own chaplain, and the
school receives all creeds on equal terms, the
growth of a cosmopolitan indifferentism is said
to be guarded against by the careful maintenance
of a high moral and religious feeling in the
school. And it would be well if boys could thus
learn that there is but one common religion,
whatever the number of theologies.

The report acknowledges the friendly sympathy
of the Minister of Public Instruction, and ends
with a hope that the French Emperor himself
will recognise a system which "seems to be the
truest expression of the law of education in the
nineteenth century."

So it may be, but it is nevertheless little more
than reverting to the law of education in the
fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries.
Students went then so young to college that the
colleges were practically schools. There was a
very uniform method of instruction, so that
colleges in France, Italy, England, and elsewhere,
sent their scholars through the same "trivium"
and "quadrivium." The fame of a particular
teacher would draw pupils from all parts of
Europe to Paris, Montpellier, Bologna, Louvain,
and Oxford. The student in search of a good
education rambled thus through different places of
education from one country to another, and the
trained scholar was, by the want of a large
educated public in each country, forced to be
cosmopolitan. The educated men of all countries
banded themselves into one republic of letters,
and were like the Levites of old, without a
country set apart for them, scattered among the
possessions of the other tribes. In that old
cosmopolitan republic Latin was the common tongue,
because no living language spoke to a large
number of the learned. What scholarship then
did to compel intercommunication between men
of all countries, commerce is now doing, and the
recent immense increase of facility for rapid
travel makes even the idler wish that he were
less frequently tongue-tied by the want of power
to speak at ease with Frenchman, Italian, or
Spaniard, German or Dane, when meeting him and
receiving friendly offices from him in his country.

If one could really get good schools and
correspondence of teaching, there is no doubt that
a boy would see the world who could be sent to
school for a year in France, continue his studies
next year in Germany, in the year following carry
his books to Italy, and, still working his way up,
as it were, in the classes of a single school, study
next year in Russia or in Spain. The advantages
of such a system would outweigh its disadvantages,
and the contact with so wide a community
of boys might possibly be one of them. It
certainly would not denationalise the young
English mind. English boys, sure to be numerous
in any school of the sort thus proposed, would
be a community ready to fight in play-hours with
the boys of any other nation if the honour of
their country were brought into question. To
the common schoolboy's catechism, beginning
"What's your father?" would be added "What's
your fatherland?" Every boy would uphold and
magnify his own, and the result in each case
would be, with the tolerance that comes of near
acquaintance with different ways of thought,
anything but the undesirable state of mind in
which a man don't care to think himself a Frenchman,
or a German, or an Italian, or an Englishman,
but prides himself on being a citizen of the
world at large.

Equally remote is the danger from such training
of destruction of the boundaries set between
creed and creed. If each section of young Christians
in such a school is to have its own chaplain
and its separate worship, boy nature will exercise
itself only too surely in argument over those
obvious lines of separation, and the only danger
is that, like their fathers, they will trouble
themselves more about tenets and distinctions of
belief, and points of separation between Christians,
than is altogether good for them. Contrast with
this a school containing many boys from many
parts of the world, like that of the Moravians at
Neuwied, where the animating spirit is simply
religious, but there is one common worship, and
no boy thinks of asking whether it be what his
father would call orthodox or sectarian. There
every one is content to feel that the chapel service
is an act of Christian worship, and that its only
purpose is service of God and animation to a life
of fulfilled duty. The true religious tone of a
school, and the right spirit of toleration is in
this way insensibly acquired, but it is acquired
more surely than it could be by a proclaimed
tolerance of sects with a select assortment of
chaplains always kept on hand.