The dominant idea of the Abbé de Saint Pierre is his anxiety in behalf of moral education. In proportion as we advance towards the era of liberty, we shall notice a growing interest in the development of the moral virtues.
The Abbé de Saint Pierre requires of man four essential qualities: justice, benevolence, the discernment of virtue or judgment, and, lastly, instruction, which holds but the lowest rank. Virtue is of more worth than the knowledge of Latin.
“It cannot be said that a great knowledge of Latin is not an excellent attainment; but in order to acquire this knowledge, it is necessary to give to it an amount of time that would be incomparably better employed in acquiring great skill in the observation of prudence. Those who direct education make a very great mistake in employing tenfold too much time in making us scholarly in the Latin tongue, and in employing tenfold too little of it in giving us a confirmed use of prudence.”[170]
But what are the means proposed by the Abbé de Saint Pierre? All that he has devised for organizing the teaching of the social virtues is reduced to the requirement of reading edifying narratives, of playing moral pieces, and of accustoming young people to do meritorious acts in the daily intercourse of the school. When the lessons have been recited and the written exercises corrected, the teacher will say to the pupil: “Do for me an act of prudence, or of justice, or of benevolence.” This is easier to say than to do. College life scarcely furnishes occasion for the application of the social virtues.
But the Abbé de Saint Pierre should be credited with his good intentions. He is the first in France to give his thought to this matter of professional instruction. The mechanic arts, the positive sciences, the apprenticeship to trades,—these things he places above the study of languages. Around his college, and even in his college, there are to be mills, printing offices, agricultural implements, garden tools, etc.
Was it not also an idea at once new and wise, to establish a continuous department of public instruction, a sort of permanent council, charged with the reformation of methods and with establishing, as far as possible, uniformity in all the colleges of the kingdom?
Finally, we shall commend the Abbé de Saint Pierre for having persistently urged the necessity of the education of women. From Fénelon to the Abbé de Saint Pierre, from 1680 to 1730, great progress was made in this question. We seem already to hear Condorcet when we read the following passage:—
“The purpose should be to instruct girls in the elements of all the sciences and of all the arts which can enter into ordinary conversation, and even in several things which relate to the different employments of men, such as the history of their country, geography, police regulations, and the principal civil laws, to the end that they can listen with pleasure to what men shall say to them, ask relevant questions, and easily keep up a conversation with their husbands on the daily occurrences in their occupations.”
For the purpose of sooner attaining his end, the Abbé de Saint Pierre, anticipating the centuries, demanded for women national establishments, colleges of secondary instruction. He did not hesitate to cloister young girls in boarding-schools, and in boarding-schools without vacations; and he entreated the State to organize public courses for those who, he said, “constitute one-half of the families in society.”
305. Other Inspirers of Rousseau.—With the eighteenth century there begins for modern thought, in education as in everything else, an era of international relations, of mutual imitation, of the action and reaction of people on people. The Frenchman of the seventeenth century had almost absolutely ignored Comenius. Rousseau knows Locke, and also the Hollander Crousaz,[171] whom, by the way, he treats rather shabbily, speaking of him as “the pedant Crousaz.”