France might be described as an "all-round" country, one that has achieved results of equal importance in many diverse branches of artistic and intellectual activity. Most of great nations of Europe excel (胜过) in some special branch of art or of thought, Italy in the plastic arts, Germany in philosophy and music, England in poetry and the sciences. France, on the contrary, has produced philosophers, musicians, painters, scientists, without any noticeable specialization of her effort. The French ideal has always been the man who has a good all-round knowledge better still, an all-round understanding; it is the ideal of general culture as opposed to specialization. This is the ideal reflected in the education France provides for her children. By studying this education we in England may learn a few things useful to ourselves even though, perhaps indeed because, the French system is very different from our own in its aims, its organization and its results. The French child, too, the raw material of this education, is unlike the English child and differences in the raw material may well account for differences in the processes employed.
The French child, boy or girl, gives one the impression of being intellectually more precocious (早熟的) than the product of the chillier English climate. This precocity is encouraged by his upbringing among s, not in a nursery. English parents readily adapt their conversation to the child’s point of view and interest themselves more in his s and childish preoccupations. The English are, as regards national character, younger than the French, or, to put it another way, there is in England no deep division between the life of the child and that of the grown man. The art of talking to children in the kind of language they understand is so much an English art that most of the French children’s favorite books are translations from the English. French parents, on the other hand, do their best to develop the child’s intelce as rapidly as possible. They have little patience with childish ideas even if they do not go so far as to look upon childhood as an unfortunate but necessary prelude (序言) to life. Not that they need to force the child, for he usually leads himself willingly to the process, and enjoys the effect of his unexpectedly clever remarks and of his keen judgment of men and things. It is not without significance that the French mother instead of appealing to the child’s heart by asking him to be good appeals to his reason by asking him to be wise. Reasonableness is looked for early in France, and the age of reason is fixed at seven years.
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The author considers that France ______ .