Secondary Matters: Textbooks and the Making of Physics in Nineteenth-Century France and England

Abstract

Concerning national education in England, it is like with all the other institutions in this country: at first sight it does not appear as a system, as the logical development of an idea, of a preconceived plan, but as the odd product of several forces which are diverse and often opposed; it is in appearance a purely fortuitous set of traditions, of more or less reasoned uses, local improvements, audacious or timid innovations, all together abandoned to individual initiative, in a complete abstention of public authority. It is a city built without any given alignment, where houses are randomly placed and capriciously moulded.Jacques Demogeot and Henri Montucci, 18681A very good indication of the progress the teaching of science is making in our schools and elsewhere is the rapidity with which edition after edition of Ganot's Physics is called for and published.Anon., Leeds Mercury, 18752In 1 866, in the context of educational reforms in France, Jacques Demogeot and Henri Montucci were commissioned by the French government a report on British secondary and higher education. Commissioners were also sent to other countries, including Germany, Belgium and Holland, following a common practice in nineteenth-century educational reforms which heavily drew on international comparisons for the preparation of national policies. Demogeot and Montucci published their report subsequently as a book, which was also widely read in Britain.3 Their opening paragraph, included at the heading of this paper, seems to indicate a major incongruence between French and British education.The two national case studies presented in this paper have conventionally been considered as representing essentially antagonistic models of educational development. This thought, which precedes Demogeot and Montucci and is still deeply grounded in contemporary French and English culture, has shaped scholarship on the development of science education in these countries. While French historians have stressed the role of national structures of formal education and state intervention, historians of English science have tended to focus on the role of voluntarism, informal education, autodidacticism and market forces.4However, Demogeot and Montucci' s perspective was biased by their (otherwise reasonable) aim of finding in England objects and patterns which could be compared with their experience in the French educational terrain.5 Being both teachers in a major lycee in Paris, the objects they found more likely to develop comparisons with were the English public schools. Their focus on public schools was in fact in accordance with that of the British government, which shortly before Demogeot and Montucci's visit to England, had commissioned a report on this type of educational establishment (the Clarendon Commission report), which also made frequent comparative reference to French lycees.6In spite of their unpromising opening, the two French professors developed a detailed account of English education, based both on their readings and their visits to schools. Their focus was traditional public schools. Only one third of their report on the English context was devoted to other types of schools. As we will see, for this reason, it gave less prominence to science than to the teaching of other subjects. Still, it established significant parallelisms between science education in French lycees and in a range of new schools which in the previous decades had been developing in England.Indeed, in the second quotation opening this paper we find that, in spite of the potential antagonisms between French and English education, a certain level of congruence had to exist in the teaching of science in both countries. Ganot's Physics was the translation into English of a textbook by Adolphe Ganot, a French private teacher whose work as a textbook author had been favoured by the boost in science education promoted by government reforms in France since the 1850s. …