A VICTORIAN EXPERIMENT IN INTER- NATIONAL EDUCATION: THE COLLEGE AT SPRING GROVE.

The article presents information on the early efforts in international education during the 19th century. The founding of boarding schools in various countries, with similar curricula and methods of teaching so that their pupils might migrate from one school to another and thus acquire fluency in the several languages without disrupting their studies has long been conceptualized. It was in this concept that the International Education Society was founded. The origin of the scheme lay in the report of a committee appointed by the French Imperial Commissioners for the Paris Universal Exhibition to award the prizes offered for the best essays on the advantages of educating together children of the different European nations. The idea was taken up and the plan then was to form a large company of shareholders, and to establish at four places schools which should be perfectly alike in their arrangements. The institutions were to admit pupils between the ages of eleven and eighteen and were to dovetail into one another in such a manner that after every second year each boy was to pass onto another country. The plan met with a good deal of opposition on the grounds that it would weaken the development of national character and would necessarily produce a superficial education, but its protagonists were not deterred.