St John Baptist de la Salle (1651-1719) patron saint of teachers of youth
From a wealthy family
Born into a wealthy family
at Reims in northern France, John-Baptist studied there as a boy.
He
received the clerical tonsure at 11 and became a canon of the cathedral
at 16.
He studied at the Seminary of St Sulpice in Paris, was ordained a
priest in 1678 and received his doctorate in theology two years later.
A new concept
While he was serving as a priest at
Reims, a layman, Adrial Nyel, who had opened free schools in Rouen
asked John-Baptist to help do the same thing in Reims.
Thinking at first
this entailed just a marginal supervisory involvement, John-Baptist
soon found that the teachers were not fully competent and decided to
take them into his own house to train them.
This caused a rift with his
family.
Two of his brothers left the house and five of the teachers left
as well.
But it was the beginning of a new concept of a community of
men devoted to Christian teaching.
An apostolic religious order despite opposition
Soon John-Baptist
and twelve others took simple vows of obedience and became an apostolic
religious congregation known as "the Brothers of the Christian
Schools".
Teaching was to be their way to attaining holiness.
They
started a training college for teachers in Reims in 1686.
John-Baptist
encountered opposition especially from those who felt that the poorer
classes should not be educated beyond manual skills and from church
authorities who disliked his new form of apostolic religious life.
No priests
Since he was himself a priest,
John-Baptist thought it would be good to have priests in the order, but
when the first candidate, Brother Henri L'Heureux, was ready for
ordination, he suddenly fell sick and died.
This upset John-Baptist, but
on mature reflection, he decided not to have priests so the brothers
could more easily live in humility and simplicity.
Expansion to Paris
The congregation expanded to
Paris and Saint Denis.
Here some of the Irish who had fled with King
James II to France asked the Brothers to educate their children and they
expanded into secondary education.
In this way John-Baptist's ideas and
methods spread more widely.
Methods
De La Salle believed it was better to
instruct his pupils through the vernacular (French) rather than through
Latin, because in this way they could learn to read more easily.
He also
adopted the "simultaneous method" where pupils were graded according to
their capacity, putting those of equal attainment in the same class,
giving them the same text-books, and requiring them to follow the same
lesson under one and the same teacher.
Both these developments were both
innovations in educational method at the time.
Deposed for a time
Opposition within church
circles led to John-Baptist being deposed by Cardinal Louis-Antoine de
Noailles, archbishop of Paris, for a time and replaced as superior in
1702, but this was allowed to lapse through intense opposition to it by
the brothers themselves.
However, some confrères did leave the order.
Eventually at a chapter held in 1717 his trusted colleague Brother
Barthélemy was elected superior and John-Baptist resigned.
Death and influence
Two years later John-Baptist
died on Good Friday 7th April 1719.
He was canonised in 1900 and Pope
Pius XII declared him patron of teachers in 1950.
The De La Salle
Brothers have about 5,000 members today working in 80 countries
worldwide.