Philosophy
Despite the differences on economic, social, and other issues among the Republican radicals with whom Jules Ferry identified, they were united by the desire to obtain a secular republic due to the growing popularity of anti-clericalism since the Revolution and notably during the Third Republic. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution and its new practices of employment and work days, the radicals also “hoped that schooling would make workers as reasonable and self-satisfied as it was credited with making the bourgeoisie.”
The 1698 attempt would not have held sway with the Republican radicals of Ferry’s generation, who would have seen it as Catholic propaganda and as a defense against the growing popularity of Protestantism. Likewise, Napoleon’s Imperial University remained connected to the Church and paid little heed to primary education that would ensure basic literacy needs among the larger population. In Ferry’s view, schools would educate on political doctrine and the virtues of nationalism, emphasizing independent thought.
Read more about this topic: Jules Ferry Laws
Famous quotes containing the word philosophy:
“The philosopher believes that the value of his philosophy lies in its totality, in its structure: posterity discovers it in the stones with which he built and with which other structures are subsequently built that are frequently better—and so, in the fact that that structure can be demolished and yet still possess value as material.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sun-set and moon-rise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“When a bachelor of philosophy from the Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the grounds of his color I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. When someone else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men I say that intelligence has never saved anyone: and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men.”
—Frantz Fanon (1925–1961)