Word: maintain
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Dates: during 1870-1879
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...well known, has for its corner-stone the principle of heavily endowed fellowships and competitive examinations, which latter are carried to an extreme. These institutions have, to be sure, the prestige of old age, and their supporters claim that they produce the most excellent results; but their opponents maintain that, so far from effecting this, all that Englishmen have attained in the way of scholarship has been acquired in spite of the training they receive. Besides, they say, English scholarship, even if allowed to be due to these systems, furnishes a very weak argument in favor of their maintenance...
...other they are always under the eye of a master. The dormitories resemble the wards of a hospital. Thirty or forty beds are arranged with systematic precision in a single room. A master is also here, as in the recitation-room, or the play-ground, to maintain order. Whether they work, sleep, or play, the eyes of this Argus are ever upon them...
...would be so venturesome as to maintain that it inspires students very much to go to recitations, and the present coercion to our duty is only considered an evil because it is compulsion, we think, and it but occasionally conflicts with the inclination of any except the most negligent scholars. Our position is not unlike that of the Frenchman who had never been out of Paris, but when forbidden by the king to leave it, he could not rest night or day from moving heaven and earth till this liberty was restored to him. Then, returning to his customary avocations...
...present moment there are teachers nearly everywhere, except perhaps in some secluded districts in the mountains of Auvergne or in Lower Brittany. I maintain, therefore, that it is not in the number of teachers that we are deficient. And yet we are in reality behind the other nations in matters of education. Whence does this arise? There are several reasons. In the first place, the children are not sent to school, or are taken away too young. Every commune, as I told you, pays its own teacher. It gives him a fixed salary, varying between four hundred and eight hundred...
...roads. The schools are its own, and it cares for them. With us, as you have seen, it is an entirely different matter. The government gives us our teachers; it appoints the officials to oversee them, and the instruction that they give. There is nothing left us but to maintain them...