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7 In Search ot the Perfect Citizen 7r

typical new-generation politicians is quite traditional when defining the role of school: “Instruction makes leamed people, but only morał education makes citizens" ³¹. Vasile Boerescu goes in the same direction: school should model "enlightened and virtuous men, zealous citizens” ³². Schools were “des-tinated to enlighten the bulk of the nation, the cottage of the ploughman who with his arm feeds and defends the Country” ³³. Or, morę specific: “Our fatherland h&s never had such a need for enlightened and scienceful men as it has now; .. .Fili yourselves with the principles of morality which you pick ■up from religion and philosophy, enrich your spirit with all knowledge which make people know the truth; and be surę that you will be worthy to serve our fatherland. No service can be greater than that fulfilled through science and morality. Thus, enrich yourselves first with science, try to apply the morality in action as in words, and the Fatherland will embrace you and will be grateful to you for the substantial services you will be able to do to her”³⁴. And, quite characteristically, the revolutionaries from 1848 try now to -use school as an instrument to strengthen the social cohesion and the atta-chement to the institutions of the new state. Mihail Kogalniceanu is once morę a fine example. In a speech held in łasi in 1860, he remembers his strug-gle as a young history professor (“it was not an easy and undangerous thing to ąuicken the truth, to demand the violated rights of the Fatherland, to pronounce yourself in favor of national and civic rights” ^3S), but demands for the present day to “forget the passions and hatred between us, give hands all of us, surround with love and respect the Romanian Throne which we have founded; and only then we won’t have to fear about the futurę of our nation” ^3<ł.

Despite these continuities, during the years 1858—1864 there are also some new accents which will be developed later. We will mention here a slight laicisation, the increased confidence in science and the belief that Romania is a Western outpost in the Fast and that it has a civilizing mission in this part of Europę³⁷. The national sentiment develops slowly, although during the late 1850’s the intellectual elites realized that they should influence the people in a nationalistic manner. Yet this move towards nationalism is morę

obvious in gazettes and in newspapers or at public meetings, while in school

the official discourse still sticks to the civic human model of the Regulamen-

tary period. Further research will have to investigate the turning point when

school began to transfoim, in a similar way to Eugen Weber’s "peasants into

Frenchmen”³⁸, the Wallachian/Moldavian Christian Citizen into a ”brave

³¹    Al. Zub, M. Kogalniceanu si rolul scolii in conslrucfia Rotnaniei moderne, in Sub semnul łui Cho. Omagin acad. §tefan Pascu, Cluj, 1974, p. 522.

³²    V. Boerescu, Instrucfiunea publicd, partea I, in “Nationalul”, 1858, no. 37, p. 142.

³³    Idem, Cuventu rostitu de directorulu Scóleloru B. Boerescu, la impdrfirea pre-tniiloru din anul scolaru 1858—1859, Bucureęti, 1859, p. 2.

³⁴    Ibidem, p. 4.

³⁵    Discursul D-lui Kogalniceanu ca respunsu la acela alf u D. profesoru Columbu, cu ocasia hnp&rfirei premiiloru la §coala din Ia?i, "Nafionalul”, 1860, III, no. 66, p. 263.

⁸⁶ Ibidem, p. 264.

³⁷    V. Boerescu, Cuventu, p. 4.

³⁸    Eugen Weber, The Peasants into Frenchmen. The Modernization oj Rural France. Stanford, 1976, 38.