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John Baptist de La Salle Educator
Augustine Loes, FSC
Keynote Address by
Brother Augustine Loes, FSC
Lasallian Schools' Workshop IV
Cardinal Spellman Retreat House
Riverdale, New York
April 20, 21, 22, 1988
Until he was almost thirty one years old no one
who knew John Baptist de La Salle would every have thought that he would become involved
in education, much less elementary education, and much less even than that, the education
of the poor. Yet that is how his life turned out. Through a chain of circumstances which
are probably familiar to all of you, he eventually by the age of thirty five had given up
his ecclesiastical career, in which he most likely would have become a bishop, given up
his social position among the learned and cultured to become associated with a group of
men who were generally despised, and given up his wealth that guaranteed him a life of
considerable comfort and security, to become one with the poorest people of his day.
Almost against his will he became an educator and an organizer of a body of teachers
dedicated primarily to the elementary education of children who otherwise would have no
education at all because they had no money to pay the teachers. He worked up a project to
provide education free of charge, though he eventually got into other kinds of education
as well. In forty years he put teachers in almost sixty different schools, thirty seven of
them staffed by one hundred Brothers still going when he died. how did he do it? What was
the secret of his success? What personal qualities did he have that enabled him to start a
project that is still going strong today, three hundred years later?
Certainly his strong Christian faith was fundamental to all that he did and all the
success of his work, but this faith was mediated and effective through a number of
tangible personal characteristics that are worth considering, if only to appreciate his
genius. I do not want to minimize the indispensable and all-pervasive spiritual belief and
trust in God which is the prime mover of all that De La Salle accomplished. However, there
are a number of strictly personality traits through which God worked by virtue of this
faith. I would like to spend a few moments on six of these traits, qualities that
distinguish him as a great educator in his day, that merit for him the title awarded by
the Church, Patron of All teachers of Youth. These six are not any original discovery of
mine, nor intended to be complete, but an attempt to picture him in our minds, a keynote
as we consider in this workshop what are the characteristics of the schools that try to
capture his vision and his spirit: The Lasallian schools.
Some of these characteristics may overlap the three elements of the Lasallian school that
the other speakers will treat tomorrow: the teacher as minister of grace, association and
management. So I will touch only briefly on those topics so as not to encroach on
tomorrow. I will give only the keynote; let them do all the orchestration.
First, De La Salle was a pragmatist. I use the word in the sense that Evelyn Woodward
speaks in her book, Poets, Prophets, and Pragmatists, a New Challenge to Religious Life.
She write, "Pragmatism is often heard as a dirty word...using people, riding over
them, gratifying immediate needs and whims at the expense of deeper values." It is
certainly not in this pejorative sense that it can be applied to De La Salle. Woodward
proposes this definition: pragmatists are people gifted with "practical planning
capacity to translate into organized action the vision of the pets and the challenge of
the prophets..... They are humble and cooperative."
So I see De La Salle as a pragmatist, rather than as a theopretician. He did not, for
example, start out by writing a book on the philosophy of education, or the history of
education, or on the psychological premises for pedagogical practices. He actually began
in the trenches, helping an uneducated, untrained staff of five or six teachers to
organized their lessons, organized their students, and organize themselves. At an early
point in his adventure in his own home town, he was a substitute teacher when one of the
regular teachers became ill. He experienced what it was like to be with sixty or seventy
kids ages seven, eight, and nine, for four hours in the morning and three in the
afternoon, supervising their breakfast and lunch in the classroom, marching them to and
from church for Mass in the middle of the day, and of course, teaching them all the basics
as well as religion.
As a true pragmatist, he also read about other schools to learn how they operated, and he
borrowed from what they were doing, or had done, when it made sense to him. So, his idea
of dividing the class into grades, or levels of advancement, and teaching whole groups at
the same time, rather than tutoring individuals one at a time, may have been borrowed from
St. Peter Fourrier's Sisters of Notre Dame who began those practices in Alsace-Lorraine
around 1598, eighty years ahead of him. His pragmatic insistence on teaching in the
students' own language, French, instead of in Latin as he had been taught, may; have been
borrowed from the school of the Abbey of Port Royal or some other school of his day, since
he was not the first to employ this practical way of teaching. He very probably read
Bettencourt's Parish School, published in 1654, since most of De La Salle's schools were
parish-based, and appreciated the pastor's emphasis on knowing and treating each student
as a unique individual. The pragmatic interest in how others did the job and his
willingness to select what he felt would be good for his own work, is seen in the
postscript of his letter to Gabriel Drolin as late in the development of the Christian
Schools as 1705. "Please get precise information about the Institute of the Fathers
of the Pious Schools," he wrote, "Find out all you can about them and let me
know in the fullest possible detail."
Perhaps his pragmatism is best illustrated in the fact that he treated the whole question
of correcting and punishing students with such balance and thoroughness, a chapter of some
forty pages in the teacher's manual, a full chapter in the Brothers' Rule, and two
meditations in the book of sixteen meditations for the time of retreat, seemingly one
whole day focussing on this topic. But he also says that there is little punishment in a
good school, that the best way to get parents to support the school is to get the students
to like the school, and the best way to prevent truancy is to get the students to like
their teacher. It was pragmatism that made silence a characteristic of the teacher, not
only for good order and efficiency in the learning process, but to save the energy of the
teacher, confined as he was with so many youngsters in a relatively small room with
relatively poor ventilation. We could go on with several other examples of De La Salle's
pragmatic sense, but there are five other traits of his personality on this list.
Closely related to his pragmatism is another quality, skill as an organizer. He had a very
logical mind and was more given to making plans, establishing order, creating efficient
operation, than he was inclined to spontaneity, imagination, or allowing things to happen
by themselves. On the Myers-Brings he was a strong "J" ‹ as most executives
are. Perhaps he got some of that from his father, who was a lawyer and a judge. There is
no doubt, however, that the most effective part of his organizational skill was his
ability to work with others in a truly collaborative manner. He had a great gift of being
open to others and listening to their point of view rather than being defensive of his own
ideas. true, he was often called stubborn, but these were occasions when people hostile to
what he and the Brothers were trying to do wanted to interfere and actually destroy the
work they were doing. With the Brothers he was more docile than stubborn, let alone
dogmatic or dictatorial. Bother the Rule that defined the Brothers' way of life and the
Conduct of Schools that described how the schools ere to be run were written as much by
the Brothers as by De La Salle. Both were based on the experience the Brothers had in
their day to day living over a period of years, revised several times as they learned from
experience. De La Salle's practice from as early as 1680 was to call the Brothers
together, especially the more experienced, and discuss with them the decisions they had to
make as a group in order to achieve the purposes they had in their community life and in
their work as teachers.
His organizational skill was probably best evidenced when confronted with a challenge.
This is how he got involved with teachers in the first place. He couldn't stay uninvolved
when he saw how disorganized they were; he just had to step in and help them. It was most
notably manifest when in 1691, after eleven years of trying to get the project of the
Institute going, it seemed on the verge of total collapse. Half the members had quit. The
rest were exhausted from overwork and loss of their original fervor. What did he do? He
got two of them to sign on with him for life in a special vow. He secured property and a
house to bring his men together for a good rest and a complete renewal of spirit. He
organized a novitiate. Then he kept regular contact with each Brother individually, asking
them to write to him every month if he could not visit them personally. It was a turning
point in the history of the project. It is an example of his skill as an organizer under
pressure.
Another example of good organization was his concentration on cities. He wanted schools
with 200 or more students so that he could have at least two Brothers working together,
but preferably four or five. He often had a large community serving several schools in the
same city. He wanted the Brothers to have a lot of mutual support, not only spiritually,
but also in their educational work.
Later on, another educational genius, Blessed Marcellin Champagnat, would form a religious
community of Brothers to complement De La Salle's focus on the cities. He trained his
Brothers wo work alone and in two's in order to provide a Christian education in small
rural areas. One of his first members was a youngster fourteen years old whom the De La
Salle Brothers had rejected because he was too young. Evidently Champagnat was also a good
pragmatist! That was during the revival of the Institute after the French Revolution,
apparently before the re-opening of a junior novitiate. Blessed Champagnat's order is the
Marist Brothers, who celebrate the 200th anniversary of their founder's birth next year.
A third quality of De La Salle's personality was his emphasis on good materials for the
educational process, especially books. Mention has already been made of the handbooks for
teachers and administrators, called the conduct (or Management) of the Christian Schools.
This, or course, can be considered as part of his pragmatic or organizational skills. Even
before the book was printed, all the Brothers apparently had their own manuscript copy of
at least part of it which they wrote while they were novices. In a letter written to
Brother Matthias on June 4, 1708, Brother Ponce (who was Visitor for South France) asks
that he bring with him to his new assignment "the copy of the rule for school, the
one in very small handwriting....by Brother Clement." Our earliest existing printed
copy is dated 1720 and runs 290 pages. It covers every conceivable detail of running a
school from the first interview with the parents who are enrolling a student and the
procedures for opening the school at 8:00 a.m. to the reasons for expelling a student and
the closing of school at 5:00, or 4:30 in winter. It includes the description of the
school furniture and a number of visual aids for the teaching of reading, writing, and
arithmetic. evidently there were also charts listing the rule of proper behavior for the
students during the lessons.
One of the books composed by De La Salle was an ingenious combination of an advance reader
("when the students know how to read French perfectly") and a text on
politeness, called The Rules of Decorum and Christian Civility. Such books on politeness
were common in 17th century France; one of them written by a secular went through fifteen
editions between 1671 and 1730. De La Salle not only made his text a good reader, but
introduced it within a Christian context as opposed to a mere politic way of behaving. He
also made of it a bridge for the lowest class of society to move up the social scale in
their understanding of and training in the rule of proper behavior in the upper classes.
(it must not be overlooked that this was the effect of the whole thrust of his Christian
schools.) The earliest edition of De La Salle's Rules of Decorum was printed in 1702 in a
Gothic script that resembles what we might call calligraphy ‹ possibly to tie in with
the teaching of writing. It numbers 252 pages and covers every detail of personal grooming
and proper etiquette in social behavior. it was one of the most popular of De La Salle's
school books, running through six editions before 1730 and 190 editions or reprintings
during the next 140 years! A good question to ask is how come we do not have a text and a
course on that topic in our schools today?
Another series of books by; De La Salle concerned the teaching of religion, actually seven
books altogether. These include a book of prayers and hymns for use in class, a book of
instruction on Mass, Confession, and Holy Communion, an exposition of Christian doctrine
for the teacher (printed in 1703 and numbering 504 pages), two catechisms based on this
exposition, and two abbreviated editions of these catechisms, one called the Large
Abbreviation (430 pages), the other the Small Abbreviation (35 pages). As an educator, De
La Salle can rightly be considered energetic in producing publications for the use of his
teachers. He had a high regard for the value of books in the educational process.
A fourth quality that De La Salle possess in his role as an educator was his openness to
new educational enterprises. He was an innovator in many respects, even though he was also
an eclectic in borrowing from other educators. most of his "inventions" were
simply generous answers to special educational needs that cropped up, more exactly the
different needs of special young people. One of his first creations was a training school
for teachers to serve alone in rural parishes, since he was unwilling to send Brothers out
alone. This was in 1687 in Reims. It did not last long, largely because once the need had
been met there was no longer a demand. A year or two later in Paris he kept a small
stocking factory going as an adjunct to the school, having a Brother trained for this
purpose and improving its efficiency, an early example of vocational training. He
organized a special boarding school with classical studies (probably taught by himself)
for about fifty Irish emigrees (following King James in exile) in 1698. A year later he
developed a Sunday academy for young working men who couldn't attend school on weekdays.
It not only advanced their education, but retarded their self-destruction on weekends. He
opened a boarding school with tuition in Rouen in 1705 (to help support the novitiate); it
gradually became a kind of secondary program for the middle class without classical
studies, a real departure from current practice. A short time later in the same school he
admitted a few incorrigibles (whom we would call delinquents today) and adapted a program
for them within the existing curriculum (what we would call mainstreaming today). Still
later in the same building (which was also the novitiate and the headquarters of the
Institute ‹ St. Yon), he accepted and developed a program for adult prisoners fro the
upper classes and even some who were mentally ill, in need of what today we call
hospitalization. Finally, in the seaport town of Calais, one of the last schools he
staffed with Brothers had certain adaptions suitable to young men planning on a maritime
career. Reviewing such enterprises we get the impression that he and the Brothers had an
unwritten slogan, "If it needs to be done, we can do it." It was certainly an
admirable quality of flexibility, ingenuity, and creativity that came from a great
sensitivity to the needs around them and a great energy to meet these needs. A fifty
quality of De La Salle that should be mentioned at least briefly is his courage. He had to
have this in order to be such a pragmatist, such an organizer, to have such energy to
produce books and created new programs with so little in the way of human resources to
work with and the meager financial assistance he usually got. But his courage is
especially evident, of course, in the way he coped with outright opposition from the
educational monopolies that fought him in one lawsuit after another and occasionally with
vandalism and violence. His project never got government authorization during his
lifetime. Today his schools could be considered a form of civil disobedience. Church
authorities under whole aegis he operated were often unkind to him and left him
unprotected from hostile action when they could have helped him. There was also a good
deal of ecclesiastical interference ‹ even attempts to get rid of him and take over
the Brothers as diocesan adjunct, destroying De La Salle's original plan altogether. He
had a lot of courage to hang on for forty years. It was built on faith, of course. But
grace builds on nature, too. He as naturally a strong person, a man of courage.
The sixty and last quality of De La Salle as an educator that I wish to mention is his
profound understanding of what is the most important ingredient in the educational
process: the teacher-student relationship. First of all, it should be recognized that De
La Salle not only had a very high estimation of the dignity of the teacher, but he also
had a very great confidence in the ability of the ordinary person to be a good teacher. As
a matter of fact, the original Brothers often had very little education themselves. He
even said that they were beneath the level of his own manservant. A few did have some
study for the priesthood and were attracted to the project of the Christian Schools as an
idealistic alternative to their pursuing the clerical state. But de La Salle was not
founding a clerical institute for the job of elementary education. This did not make any
sense to him at all. He knew, in fact, that others had tried that an that in the nature of
things it failed. Neither did he have a concern about founding a religious order. If he
did, he mad no apparent effort to get approval from Rome for it. In fact, he even
dissuaded some Brothers who urged him to do this through the intermediary of King James
when he as helping the Irish students. As a matter of fact, he knew that the project he
was founding did not conform to any of the prescribed norms for a religious order. He was
founding a community of laity. Granted he had them wear a special robe and formed them
into a community following a rule. But they called themselves Brothers and solemnly agreed
in writing not to have any priests among them, much less as superiors. The idea was to
stick to elementary education for the poor as their primary purpose. The Institute was an
is today a community of laymen working for the Church. When it was finally approved by the
Church six years after De La Salle's death, it was still a unique and original foundation,
the first of its kind, an all-male, all-lay association in the Church. It really was not
officially recognized as a religious order until forced to be so by the code of canon law
in 1917.
This is a bit of a digression, but really relevant today as we Brothers are trying to
communicate our vision of education to the men and women "lay" colleagues in our
schools. The charism of De La Salle is especially apt for the laity in the Church because
it was originally intended for them as distinct from the clergy. It is essentially a
spirit of faith, the gift of baptism, channeled into the mission of Christian education:
proclaiming the good new of the Gospel and enabling young people, especially the
disadvantaged, to live a fully human and Christian life. This workshop is aimed at
communicating this charism of De La Salle, this vision of Christian education.
In order to implement this vision, De La Salle conceived a very high ideal for the
teacher-student relationship. Though the Christian Schools enrolled large classes, and
though the Brothers taught large groups of students at the same time, De La Salle insisted
that the teacher know each of the students as an individual person, reaching out and
treating each student differently according to each one's special needs, and forming a
warm and friendly relationship with each student. The teacher must love each student. It
was not to be simply a spiritual, supernatural charity. De La Salle wanted it expressed in
kindness, gentleness, and sensitivity. His favorite word here is tenderness. He asks
teachers to win the hearts of the students. He understood that there could be no
significant learning without this kind of relationship. Today, numerous psychological
studies are proving how true this is. De La Salle was keenly aware of it three hundred
years ago. It was based on a spirit of faith expressed in concrete everyday relationships
of respect, affection, and devotion to each student as a unique and priceless individual.
The fact that De La Salle was a pragmatist in the good sense of that word, that he had
excellent organizational skills, especially in achieving a high level of collaboration
from others, the fact that he produced such fine written materials for use by teachers and
students, that he was so venturesome in creating different kinds of schools to meet the
needs of different kinds of youth, the fact that he withstood all kinds of opposition and
interference with great courage, and knew all along the indispensable needs in education
for a strong affective bond between teacher and student ‹ all this is at least one
reason why his work has endured and why he was declared Patron of All Teachers of Youth by
Pope Pius XII in 1950 to celebrate the 300th anniversary of his birth.
Today, we can take courage that his vision of the Christian School is still relevant,
especially his appreciation of the role of the teacher as minister of grace, in the ideal
of the school as an association to form an educational community, and in the importance he
placed on good management, of having schools run well according to a good methodology to
achieve good goals. These three aspects of the Christian school will be our study
tomorrow. |
