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Excerpt |
A Christian Educator of Youth in the Nineteenth Century: Father Jean Baptiste Lalanne
Pierre Humbertclaude, SM, Translaged by Herbert Pieper, SM
278 pp., $8.00
No charge to members of the SM or FMI
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M. Lalanne was of the old school. “If we develop the minds of the young,” he said in 1821, “we do it not to teach them, but to make them capable of teaching themselves. We want to develop their intelligence and give scope to their faculties, …and to form them in such as way that when they give themselves exclusively to some branch of knowledge, they will have no trouble with it. They will discover the false and the true, and classify and retain what they learn. What then ought to determine the choice of the studies of our youth? Evidently, the characteristics of each branch of study that can facilitate the development of certain faculties of the mind, especially those we consider most important.
Since all branches of learning contribute in their own way to the general formation of the mind, M. Lalanne would have accepted quite naturally, even though unconsciously, the idea expressed by Roederer in 1803. Insist on literary and scientific formation from the earliest years. The last line of the text cited above also brings out that the young director of studies of rue des Menuts intended to keep a hierarchy of disciplines. This relative importance of each kind of knowledge is clearly put forth by him in the following quotation. In a speech in which he gives warm praise to the natural sciences, M. Lalanne fears he will be misunderstood by his listeners and makes his thought very clear: “Do not think that… I want to get rid of the program of studies almost universally accepted, … Do not think I want to put into the hands of a child an insect or flower instead of a principle. No, I have too much respect for all those years of experience … I will continue to teach the youngest children the principles of language; then I will have them interpret as best they can our first masters in the art of writing; I will lead them, if I can, even to the enjoyment of Homer and Virgil as a satisfying result of their studies; I will in no way diminish their work in mathematics, and I ask nothing for the natural science but the students’ time of recreation and their hours of leisure.”
The supremacy of the classical studies was still unchallenged. They made the best contribution to the formation of the mind and heart and provided the good taste with which to control the imagination. Even though time had been taken from the classics in favor of mathematics, this diminution, a far from harmful concession to the times, was compensated for by the excellence and refinement in teaching methods. Thus the Institution of the rue des Menuts developed its own method of teaching Latin which was “a revised and adapted combination of the methods of Rollin and the Jesuits.”
Mathematics have their place, because they discipline the faculty of judgment and bring restraint to the purely literary culture. But this discipline is not without its dangers to the young man. “Whatever respect I have for this admirable mathematical knowledge, I would not want to abandon the judgment of youth entirely to it. The student, I am afraid, would become so used to mathematical evidence that he could admit no truth but the one support by it… We will never demonstrate mathematically that we must be just, temperate, faithful; but to be so still remains our obligation.”
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