But a thing still more remarkable than to have popularized gratuitous instruction, already realized in many places through charity schools, is to have formed the conception of obligatory instruction. La Salle, who did not believe that this was any encroachment on the liberty of parents, proposes, in this Conduct of Schools, a means for affecting their will:—
“If among the poor there are certain ones who are unwilling to take advantage of the opportunities for instruction, they should be reported to the rectors. The latter will be able to cure them of their indifference by threatening to give them no more assistance till they send their children to school.”
284. Professional Instruction.—Besides primary schools proper, La Salle, who is truly an innovator, inaugurated the organization of a technical and professional instruction. At Saint Yon, near Rouen, he organized a sort of college where was taught “all that a young man can learn, with the exception of Latin, and whose purpose was to prepare the student for commercial, industrial, and administrative occupations.”
285. Conduct of the Christian Schools: Successive Editions.—La Salle took the trouble to draw up for his Institute a very minute code of rules, with this title: The Conduct of Schools. The first edition bears the date of 1720. It appeared at Avignon a year after the author’s death.[161] Two other editions have since appeared, in 1811 and in 1870, with some important modifications. The substance has not been changed, but certain passages relative to discipline, and to the use of the rod, have been suppressed.
“With the view to adapt our education to the mildness of the present state of manners,” says the preface of 1811, “we have suppressed or modified whatever includes corporal correction, and have advantageously (sic) replaced this, on the one hand, by good marks, by promises and rewards, and on the other by bad marks, by deprivations and tasks.”
On the other hand, some additions have been made. The Institute of the Brethren had to yield in part to the demands of the times, and to subtract something from the inflexibility of its government.
“The Brethren,” it is said in the preface to the edition of 1870, written by the Frère Philip, “the Brethren have little by little enlarged the original Conduct, in proportion as they have perfected their methods.... It is plain that a book of this kind cannot receive a final form. New experiments, progress in methods, legislative enactments, new needs, etc., require that it receive divers modifications from time to time.”
286. Abuse of Regulations.—A feature common to the pedagogy of the Jesuits, and to that of the Brethren of the Christian Schools, is, that everything is regulated in advance with extraordinary exactness. No discretion is left to the teachers. The instruction is but a rule in action. All novelty is interdicted.
“It has been necessary,” says the Preface of La Salle, to prepare this Conduct of the Christian schools, “to the end that there may be uniformity in all the schools, and in all the places where there are Brethren of the Institute, and that the methods employed may always be the same. Man is so subject to slackness, and even to changeableness, that there must be written rules for him, in order to keep him within the bounds of his duty, and to prevent him from introducing something new, or from destroying that which has been wisely established.”
Need we be astonished, after this, that the teaching of the Brethren often became a useless routine?