A LESSON FROM SWISS CATHOLICS

New Zealand Tablet, 12 January 1911, Page 77

A LESSON FROM SWISS CATHOLICS

In educational matters (writes Mrs. Crawford in the Dublin Review), Switzerland to-day is confessedly in the first rank among nations. The Swiss cantons, possessing as they do complete home-rule in educational matters, one of them, the Catholic canton of Fribourg, has elaborated for herself .a system of compulsory continuation (or post-gradu-ate) schools that must serve as a model to all reflective men. Briefly put, no boy in Fribourg is free from educational supervision until, at the age of nineteen, he enters the citizen army for his military training and no girl is free until she lias passed through two years of domestic training. Several .other cantons have in a large measure adopted methods of education similar to those of Fribourg. That of Fribourg, especially interesting to Catholics, is typical of all that is best in Swiss education. It is due to the excellent basis of the elementary schools that the canton has been able to give to Catholic Christendom one of her most flourishing universities. That basis is of course the elementary school with its six standards, which normally cover the six years from the seventh to the thirteenth birthday.

At thirteen boys intended for a university or commercial career, or even for the higher professional training, pass into secondary schools, public or private. The majority of working class boys in Fribourg spend the years between fourteen and sixteen in what is known as the ecole secondaire professionelle. At the age of sixteen, when the youth is turned over to his apprenticeship, he is forced to attend a continuation-school one half-day each week during the whole three years of his indenture. " The masters, too, are forced to comply with the law. The object of the apprentice-school is to supplement, on the theoretic side the instruction given in the workshop. Several stiff examinations have to be undergone, and after his three years’ indenture closes, he undergoes ten weeks’ military training.

Though Germany and Austria possess schools of this post-graduate type, the especial excellence of Fribourg lies in • the classes of perfectioning,’ so called, for young* men who do not become* apprentices, i.e., for the vast army of agricultural and unskilled laborers who have nothing done for them after their thirteenth year in other countries of the world—America, England, France, Belgium, to name but these. All are compelled to attend these ‘ finishing classes’ until they have passed the federal examination for recruits. They are open only during the winter months (November to April) so as not to interfere with harvest work and tillage. Fines and imprisonment are the penalty of non-attendance.

No attempt is made (says Mrs. Crawford) to impart higher education, or to encourage the intelligent peasant youth to aspire to the dignity of a clerkship. On the contrary, the aim is to sultivate a good general level of instruction and practical intelligence, and to ensure, as far as may be, that the lessons learned in school are remembered and applied. Hence the teaching is mainly repetitive, and includes such subjects as history, geography, arithmetic, and book-keeping. No fees are charged, but the expense is not great, for each pupil, making but one attendance in the week, a small school with a single teacher suffices for a considerable district. It is pleasant (says Mrs. Cranford) to be able to state that the education of girls lias also been exceptionally well attended to in the Swiss cantons. The country ha's been able to solve for women the problem of the tradeschool and the domestic school. The domestic school of Switzerland is remarkable in that it does not concern itself solely with training a young woman in cookery and housekeeping. It is regarded as a real preparation for life, inasmuch as it seeks to convert the wasteful, uncomfortable, unhealthy homes of the working classes into centres of prosperity and well-being. Their superior success, continues Mrs. Crawford, is due to the wholesome fact that they were organised and guided by women for women, and that the directresses were matrons of experience and maturity. c ‘Tho authorities in Fribourg,’ says Mrs. Crawford, seem to me to. have been particularly happy in escaping the double danger of assuming on the one hand that girls can be educated, simply like boys, and, on the other, of arguing that as they are not boys, some quite inferior form of education is sufficient for them. Girls at Fribourg have a whole series of schools at their service, in which intellectual equipment and - domestic accomplishment are duly balanced. J

Briefly, the underlying principle has been that every girl who does not pass into a secondary school must go through a course of domestic training, and every secondary school is compelled by law to include domestic training in its curriculum. &