The Conduct of the Christian Schools by John Baptist de La Salle

Abstract

The Conduct of the Christian Schools. By John Baptist de La Salle.Translated by F. de La Fontainerie and Richard Arnandez. Edited with notes by William Mann. [Lasallian Sources,Volume 6.] (Landover, Maryland: Lasallian Publications. 1996. Pp. 287.) This is a richly detailed handbook for the day-by-day and minute-by-minute running of an elementary school in the neglected parts of Reims, Rouen, Paris, and a growing succession of other cities in the early eighteenth century. From the beginnings of the Christian Brothers' order in the 1680's, De LaSalle and the first teachers began to accumulate operational tactics in manuscript form. On parallel tracks, rules of the order and spiritual reading treatises were also being produced. But this manual stays with the operational, and it leaves nothing to chance. To contemporary teachers accustomed to almost-presiding over chaos, the Conduct can seem oppressive. But the evidence is that it worked, and in an environment of almost unimaginable deprivation. Long known in English as Management of Christian Schools, the Conduct has been brought out in a scholarly edition of the 1720 first printing from the 1706 manuscript. For many years, loyal Christian Brothers treated this and other works as if they had sprung from the brain of St. John Baptist de LaSalle, our founder, in publishable form. A surge of modern research has revealed a far more human and appealing process of collaboration between De LaSalle and the first Brothers, on all the central documents of their then-new-model congregation: rules, readers for students, and the historically most significant Conduct. (Certain other writings for the Brothers, notably meditations, are more clearly De LaSalle's own.) What is not attempted here is a survey of the work's permutations as it has followed the Brothers into higher levels of education and other cultures.The monumental French-language series, Cahiers LaSalliens, will certainly get around to doing so. But this lack, if it is one, in the current volume allows the enduring pedagogical good sense of the 1720 edition to show luminously through the details which would otherwise risk seeming quaint. Again, this manual worked in school as nothing previously had. And its principles still do. I think it is important to realize that students love to be in classes that are run this way. They feel obliged to test the system as a duty of their state in life and, in half the cases, of their gender. But they don't want to win, because then the bullies take over and nothing is accomplished. If there is one dominant thread in the Conduct, it is that everything is purposeful. …