Reading ComprehensionDifficulty: Medium

PT127 S4 P4 Q22 Explanation

French Egalitarian Education Reforms

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TopicsInferenceSociety

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Passage

During most of the nineteenth century, many French women continued to be educated according to models long established by custom and religious tradition. One recent observer has termed the failure to institute real and lasting educational reform at the end of the eighteenth century a "missed opportunity"—for in spite of the egalitarian in particular attempted to institute educational systems for women that were, to a great extent, egalitarian.

The first of these proposals endeavored to replace the predominantly religious education that women originally received in convents and at home with reformed curricula. More importantly, the proposal insisted that, because education was a common good that should be offered to both sexes, instruction should be available to everyone. By the same continued to define women in terms of their roles in the domestic sphere and as mothers.

That neither proposal was able to envision a system of education that was fully equal for women, and that neither was adopted into law even as such, bespeaks the immensity of the cultural and political obstacles to egalitarian education for women at the time. Nevertheless, the vision of egalitarian educational reform was origin, as doing so allowed them to appropriate the legitimacy conferred by tradition and historical continuity.

What this question is testing

Inference

Your task

Find what must be true based on what the passage or stimulus states.

Common trap

Answers that are plausible or likely but not actually guaranteed by the text.

Winning move

Keep only the choice the statements fully support — eliminate anything that requires an extra assumption.

Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.

The question
22.

It can be inferred from the passage that the French legislators who passed new educational laws in the

Answer choices

  1. No Support: removing domestic skills4% picked this

    committed to removing education in the skills necessary for domestic life from the

    Even though we know these legislators are broadly going to be advancing the educational opportunities for women, there's nothing in this window of text that says they're getting rid of "domestic skill education".

  2. No Support: "unaware"1% picked this

    unaware of the difficulties that the earlier legislators faced when advocating

    We know they're aware of the proposed legislation. We don't know whether or not they're aware of the difficulties it encountered, but presumably they would be. If you found an old proposed piece of legislation similar to what you're currently proposing, you would presumably find out why the last one failed to pass. This answer seems to want to fish people into making an unsupported inference that, "If they're trying to push the same agenda that failed a century ago, they must not realize how difficult it's gonna be".

  3. Correct78% picked this

    concerned with improving educational equality across economic strata as well as

    Why this is right

    There's not great support for this, but it's better than any other choice. We know they were helping educational equality for women by "founding public secondary schools for women" (and compulsory attendance also meant that women couldn't be pulled out of school early to learn domestic stuff at home). The support for better equality across economic strata (i.e. working class, middle class, upper class) is that they proposed "abolishing fees" for education. Fees for schooling would presumably price out some poorer citizens, but if you abolish fees than you help to equalize educational access.

    Skill tested: Inference · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.

  4. No Support: "more open to compromise"15% picked this

    more open to political compromise than were the legislators who introduced the previous

    We have no ammunition for making that comparison. This seems to invite the illicit inference that "if THEY were able to get THEIRS passed, then these legislators must have been more willing to compromise". Maybe. But it's at least as likely that the difference between the failure of these reforms to pass the first time and the successful passage 100 years later is simply that the culture had changed over the course of 100 years to be more receptive to / demanding of these reforms.

  5. No Support2% picked this

    more inclined to give religious authorities a role in education than were the legislators who introduced the

    No Support: "more inclined to give religion role" We can't judge this comparison, since our snippet of text on the 1880s legislators includes no information about what role religious authorities would / wouldn't be playing.

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