All this time his inventive faculties are deliberately sterilized; he can be nothing but a passive recipient; whatever he might have produced under the other system he cannot produce under this one; the balance of debit and credit is utter loss .-- Meanwhile, the cost has been great.

Whilst the apprentice, the clerk busy with his papers in his office, the interne with his apron standing by the bedside of the patient in the hospital, pays by his services, at first for his instruction, then for his breakfast, and ends in gaining something besides, at least his pocket-money, the student under the Faculty, or the pupil in a special school is educated and lives at the expense of his family or of the State; he gives back in exchange not work that is useful to mankind, none that is worth anything on the market; his actual consumption is not compensated for by his actual production.

Undoubtedly, he cherishes the hope that some day or other he will obtain compensation, that we will refund later and largely both capital and interest, and all the advances made; in other words, his future services are discounted and, as far as he is concerned, he speculates on a long credit .-- It remains to be seen whether the speculation is a good one; whether, at last, the receipts will cover the expenses, in short, what will be the net or average returns on the man thus fashioned.[6375] Now, among the forces expended, the most important to take into account is the time and attention of the pupil, the sum of his efforts, this or that quantity of mental energy; he has only a limited provision of this, and, not only is the proportion of this which the system consumes excessive, but, again, the application of it which the system enforces is not remunerative.

The provision is exhausted and by a wrong use of it, with scarcely any profit .-- In our lycees, the pupil sits at his task more than eleven hours a day; in a certain ecclesiastical college it is twelve hours, and, from the age of twelve years, through the necessity of being first in competition as well as for securing the greatest number of admissions through various examinations .-- At the end of this secondary education there is a graduated scale of successive test, and first the baccalaureat.

Fifty out of one hundred candidates fail and the examiners are indulgent.[6376] This proves, first of all, that the rejected have profited by their studies; but it likewise proves that the program of the examination is not adapted to the general run of minds, nor to the native faculties of the human majority; that many young men capable of learning by the opposite method learn nothing by this one; that education, such as it is, with the kind and greatness of the mental labor it imposes, with its abstract and theoretical style, is beyond the capacity of the average mind .-- Particularly, during the last year of classical studies, the pupils have had to follow the philosophy lectures: in the time of M.Laromiquiere, this might be useful to them; in the time of M.Cousin, the course, so far, did but little harm; at the present day, impregnated with neo-Kantism, it injects into minds of eighteen, seventeen, and even sixteen years, a metaphysical muddle as cumbersome as the scholasticism of the fourteenth century, terribly indigestible and unhealthy for the stomachs of novices; the swallow even to bursting and throw it off at the examination just as it comes, entirely raw for lack of the capacity to assimilate it .-- Often, after failure at the baccalaureat, or on entering the preparatory or Grande Ecoles, the young people go into, or are put into, what they call "a box" or an "oven" a preparatory internat, similar to the boxes in which silkworms are raised and to the ovens where the eggs are hatched.