GEOGRAPHY IN THE SCHOOLS OF FRANCE. M. E. Levasseur, professor at the College of France and at the Conservatory of Arts and Trades, read a very able and interesting paper before the Sixth International Congress of Geography, held in London, July, 1895. The paper was subsequently published as a pamphlet, and, through the courtesy of the author, has been placed at the disposal of the Commissioner of Education. Copious extracts are here presented. In the preface M. Levasseur says: The manner of teaching geography varies according to the institution where instruction is given. It is not the same in primary, in secondary, and in higher schools. There are three degrees which it behooves to study separately. They do not all admit either the same matters or the same development in common matters, nor the same method of exposition. Moreover, each of these degrees admits manifold gradations according to the general development of the pupils in culture and the kind of preparation in the institution; one could not give precisely the same instruction in a small school of a village as in a large city; in a school in Paraguay as in one in Saxony. Inasmuch as two reporters have been appointed by the committee of organization to treat the subject, I shall not undertake to consider it in all its phases, so as to avoid confusion and repetition by taking points which M. Lehman will not discuss. I shall, indeed, respond with more precision to the desire of the committee who have asked that study of me, and I shall render a better service to my colleagues by devoting myself specially to the teaching of geography in France, and presenting some of my personal views in that behalf. As for the works in which I have endeavored to make known my sentiments on primary and secondary instruction, I refer the reader to the note on the method of teaching geography proposed by M. Levasseur, which I communicated to the Fifth International Congress of Geographic Science, at Berne. THE PRIMARY SCHOOL. Geography necessarily should figure in the whole programme of primary education. For it is important for every person to have some knowledge of the subject, and a large majority of the inhabitants of a country, receiving instruction only therein, would suffer loss if the primary school failed to impart it. I maintain that next to the three fundamental branches-reading, writing, and arithmetic-history and geography are those most important in that instruction. In a report made in America under the name of a special committee, Mr. W. T. Harris, Commissioner of Education of the United States, places geography before history in rank of importance, because it imparts to the child practical, real knowledge which will be useful in life. I cite the argument as having a certain value, but I am content myself to ask for equality in these two studies. The Maternal School (L'école maternelle).-Before the primary school should we make a place for geography in the maternal school, otherwise called kindergarten? A question to be left, in my opinion, to every directress of a school of that sort. If the directress judges that her children have understandings sufficiently developed to comprehend (their eyes on the globe) that there are lands and seas, that their country and their districts are situate somewhere on that globe, to the degree that they can take some interest in looking at those figures representing men-white, yellow, and black-mountains and valleys-she may inspire in them, by amusing them, an incipient desire to know geography. But one must guard against general rules and impose nothing as a task. One does not gain time in undertaking to give notions of geography to children before the age of 6 or 7 years, which in general is that of entrance to the primary school. Geography, so named, has no place in the maternal school. TWO METHODS PROPOSED FOR BEGINNING INSTRUCTION IN GEOGRAPHY. Even in the primary school geography should not be admitted until the pupil has learned sufficiently to read and write. Instruction therein should be very simple, clear, methodical, and demonstrative, and, as far as possible, it also should be regulated by a method, uniform in all schools, of the same degree in the same country. La Géographie dans les Écoles et á l'Université. Par E. Levasseur, professeur au Collège de France, et au Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. Two methods present themselves to lead beginners into the first principles-the commune (or particular) and the earth (or general) methods. I much prefer the former, but I believe that it would be an error to adhere in a manner exclusive or too long to either. The first programme of special secondary instruction fell into that mistake when, under the title of "Summary study of France," which should be made in the preparatory year, it was prescribed not only to begin with the department in which the school was located, but to continue with neighboring departments and proceed, successively, throughout all the departments of France. Such sequence is not one of order. It could not but make confusion in the memory of pupils, because particular features do not attach themselves to every general plan. If description of the locality interest the child, it is mainly because he knows it before the teacher has described it to him; but when it comes to regions that he has never seen, or which are in no wise connected with those which he has seen, it profits him little to speak about a place situated 50 or 500 kilometers distant. PLAN OF THE CLASS-STUDY OF THE COMMUNES AND DEFINITIONS. This is why I have never ceased during thirty years to advise that the first place should be given to the study of the commune, whose territory is familiar to the pupil, especially if it is rural, and even to begin before the commune with the class and the school. I have given an example of the method in a series of small departmental geographies, the first of which (Seine-et-Oise) I composed myself, and the others were prepared by different authors on the same plan and under my direction. The Germans, long before, employed a similar method. The Americans and other peoples use it often. It is easy to publish a departmental geography. It is not easy to find an editor who will undertake the publication of the geography of a commune unless it be of a large city, because the sale of the volume will be too small. We must therefore trust for that instruction almost entirely to the good will and the tact of the teacher, giving to him, however, some directions. Of what use is description of the school? Merely to make the new pupil learn how to draw a map of any place on paper or a blackboard, and recognize the right, the left, direction in general, and give to him a first idea of position. A child having well gotten that idea will be able promptly to read a map. Why the commune? To attain the same end and to impart to pupils, with help of experience, the idea of essential definitions. On the bank of a stream they can easily be made to understand the course of a river, the right bank, the left, and even the basin; on rising ground, they will perceive with their own eyes a watershed, a ridge, a chain; the sight of things will keep up their attention and fix in memory the definition which, isolated, had been arid to them and unintelligible. Without doubt such sight is not enough; there are names and definitions which they must learn by heart; but, as often as possible, they must be shown the thing itself in order to be assisted in retaining the name. Thus learned with help of their eyes, definitions will be fixed in the memory in a way more rational and more enduring. So in this connection, with some modification, one might apply the proposition of Liebnitz, Nihil debet esse in memoria quod non prius fuerit in intellectu. In some of the geographical text-books assigned for primary instruction, principally in the Elementary Atlas, I have employed that method, while essaying to join with it some general ideas of the earth and geographical definitions. Not being able to put before children examples from nature-that is, for the master alone, whose business it is-I at least keep from giving any definitions without accompanying the text with an image, in order to set it before the eyes of the pupils, and I have advised teachers to complete such images with realities. This is what is done now by almost all writers of books of this kind everywhere. There is hardly any commune which has not a water course and some variations of ground which the teacher can cite in illustration of his images. If there are none, he can figure them with sand arranged in a large box. I have often repeated that the smallest phenomenon in nature can furnish comparisons which every intelligent teacher will know how to employ. For example, if a thunderstorm arises, the playground of the school is marked off with streams of water which form confluences, islands, deltas. It is by familiar examples of this kind, by images, and oft-repeated questionings, that initiation into the study is begun. USE OF THE GLOBE FOR IMPARTING FIRST NOTIONS OF THE EARTH. One of the consequences of this method is employment of the globe in beginning lessons on the earth. A child of 8 years is incapable of understanding a planisphere-that is, to transform mentally in one sphere two circles or a quadrilateral drawn upon a plane surface. Even many adults hardly conceive the true form from that deformed image. With the terrestrial globe in his hand the teacher should say, "Here is the earth. It is a ball. See the place upon it that your country occupies." Then, with finger on this globe, he gives the first lessons on oceans and continents. When, after a time, the pupil's eyes have become familiar with the rotundity of the earth, he can explain to him summarily how outlines are reproduced upon paper and place a map before his eyes. At what stage should the globe begin to be used? Opinions vary. My own is that the teacher will use it most advantageously as soon as his pupils have learned definitions by the study of the commune. That double study, the commune and the globe, suffices for the first course of instruction in geography, whose only object is to open the pupil's intelligence to geographic ideas. Make one see in order to make him understand. THE MIDDLE COURSE.1 With the middle course begins the study of geography, properly so called. It should be devoted particularly to one's country. Every child has need to know his country and learn to love it. To that end, the master in a French school should go over definitions, taking care always to accompany with examples suitable for making them understood. In every lesson he will explain what the earth is and what Europe is on the earth just enough to make them comprehend what in Europe is France. Then he will address himself to the study of France, giving the greater part of his time to physical geography and ending with the departments and a simple enumeration of colonial possessions. In many French primary schools each year is doubled; that is to say, the pupil, unless he has been found very intelligent, pursues for two successive years the same matters, and a large majority of pupils learn twice the same course-a good method, because things should be repeated in order to be fixed in the memories of children. Moreover, each course should be in some sort a development from its preceding, with review of things already understood and addition of new. HIGHER COURSE. The higher course, which pupils follow also two years, comprises, besides a rapid revision of definitions and elementary notions of cosmography, a return to the geography of France, with some new details, afterwards the study, physical and political, of Europe, a very summary study of other parts of the world, with a little more of development, however, for very important nations, as the United States and the colonial possessions of France. It is important that a pupil get precise acquaintance-I do not mean detail with those colonies which he will come before long to regard an important part of his own country. He will thus become more familiarized with that idea and be better disposed, if he should have a position, to go there without considering himself expatriated. Here follows an extended official programme of the primary schools. Then comes the method of instruction, in which the author refers to some of his own previous observations given before a conference of teachers at the Sorbonne on the occasion of the World's Exposition in Paris in 1878, in which he lays much stress upon the importance of utmost precision in instruction, yet with caution against unnecessary multiplication of details. Learn a title; learn that well, is with him a favorite maxim. REASON AND CONNECTION OF GEOGRAPHIC PHEΝΟΜΕΝΑ. After several paragraphs discussing minutely but with much interest the value of atlases, wall maps, and blackboards with outlines of maps, M. Levasseur considers the means of imparting notions of the causes and relations of phenomena. 1 The primary school of France comprises three grades-elementary, middle, and higher. 2 L'enseignement de la géographie dans l'école primaire, in the collection, "Conférences faites a la Sorbonne aux instituteurs délégués à l' Exposition universelle de 1878." Alluding to an example in a note given by him regarding the importance of a wall map in which the varying courses of the Rhone are depicted, he says: By this example it was seen that I endeavored to show, as far as possible, the reason for everything. It is of little importance that a child shall know all the windings of the Garonne, but when once he has understood how the Garonne flows at first toward the north by reason of the slope in the region of the Pyrenees, then turns to the northwest because of the obstacle of the central mass, he will have a notion of it reasoned out that he will never be able to efface from his memory. The same with the Rhone and the bend it makes suddenly at Lyons before the Cevennes, the same of the Loire, and the bend it makes between Nevers and Blois. For understanding the movement of waters one must have, first, acquaintance with relief. For this reason I am not in favor of the method which consists in teaching geography by isolated basins. This can be done with profit in a higher course, but on conditions that pupils already have an idea of the "ensemble" of relief masses. This is why it is desirable to commence by the special study of the relief of the ground, and it is well to make that study with the aid of a hypsometric chart. When, twenty years ago, I attempted to introduce that kind of chart in this instruction, it was objected that the children were not capable of understanding it. In reality they are, and it is not more difficult for them to distinguish by colors, grounds-low, medium, and high-than to figure to themselves chains of mountains by hatchings. These hatchings, when they indicate nothing except a ridge, delude by giving the impression that the chains are like walls. If they assume to indicate everything on an elementary chart, as on a topographic, they become confusing. The very simple hypsometric tints, completed, as required, by touches at the bottom and on the side of the chart, have not that defect, and allow a durable impression of the general relief of the region. Hypsometry is as desirable for a wall chart as for the maps in an atlas. CHARTS IN RELIEF. It is for the purpose of giving to children the first ideas of the form of the ground that charts in relief are recommended. They were a part of my method, and from the beginning I included them in the works undertaken by me for practical application. To be of service it is not enough to have relief; the relief should be exact. I oppose globes in relief because, however large they are, any relief is such an exaggeration that it imparts a false idea of the relations of mountains with the general surface of the earth. On one of the two globes which I had had put up, the elementary globe, which is on a scale of 40,000,000 (1 meter in circumference), I marked with a small brass nail the relative altitude of Goarsankar. The nail did not project one-fourth of a millimeter. If charts in relief are local, serving for the study of the commune, it is very desirable that the geographer (in this case often the teacher himself) should use the same scale for heights and distances, so as not to alter the angles of the slope. But if the charts present an extensive region, as France, it is necessary to exaggerate heights so as to make them sensible to the eye; still, the exaggeration should be as slight as possible. On my relief chart of France it sufficed to take a vertical scale, a quadruple of the horizontal, in order to show important variations in the ground. Besides, the appearance of relief slightly exaggerated does not deceive as much as one would suppose, because in reality we look at mountains from the bottom upward, while on the chart we regard them from the summit downward. CLASS BOOKS. In primary schools they use manuals, atlases, and text-books. The manual, comprising questions and answers, as composed by the Abbé Gautier, has the defect of relieving the teacher from personal effort, in relying too exclusively on the pupil's memory. The text-atlas-that is to say, the book containing both text and map in juxtaposition, so that the pupil has not to turn the page (a process which detracts from its utility)-appears to me preferable, and is now generally preferred in France; those of M. Foncin are so especially. They have long been in use, but it is hardly more than twenty-five years since attempts have been made to get them up in a rational manner and with careful topography. The publications of M. A. Guyot, which have done much to change the study of geography in the United States, suggested my first text atlas twenty years ago. .. In teaching geography in the primary school, material is of much importance, but the teacher of yet more importance. To apply the method I have recommended, as I have said elsewhere, "it is necessary for the teacher to perform his own part, drawing from himself some of his explanations, inventing means of demonstration, and being always ready to answer the pupil's questions." I ended the conference of 1878 in saying to the teachers that "certainly they should prefer to make a lesson profitable rather than remain bound to nomenclature; that they should make the book serve them rather than become its servant." This counsel it is well to repeat. To put it better in practice, teachers must not only be zealous but well prepared. It is in the normal school where geography has made such notable progress during twenty-five years that such preparation is the most surely obtained. M. Levasseur then proceeds to consider the schools of secondary grade (lycées and communal colleges). Passing over the general description of these which has been given quite fully in previous reports of this Office, we present here, first, the programmes of geography which obtained from 1865 to 1890, and following this tabular view the author's discussion of particular topics and statement as to the professors in charge of the subject: 1 See in particular Report for 1890-91, vol. 1, pp. 109-124. |