548. Life of the Père Girard.—Girard was born in Friburg in 1765. His pedagogic instinct manifested itself at an early hour. While still very young he aided his mother in instructing his fourteen brothers and sisters. Like Frœbel, he was passionately fond of religious questions. One day as he had heard his preceptor say that there was no salvation outside of the Roman Church, he sought his mother in tears, and asked her if the Protestant tradesman who brought her fruit each day would be damned. His mother reassured him, and he always remained faithful to what he called “the theology of his mother,”—a tolerant and broad theology which brought on him the hatred of the Jesuits.
At the age of sixteen he entered the order of the Gray Friars, and completed his novitiate at Lucerne. He then taught in several convents, in particular at Wurtzburg, where he remained four years (1785-1788). He returned to Friburg in 1789, and for ten years he devoted himself almost exclusively to his ecclesiastical functions.
But his vocation as an educator was even then indicated by some things that he had written.
In 1798, under the influence of the ideas of Kant, whose philosophical doctrine he had ardently studied, he published a Scheme of Education for all Helvetia, addressed to the Swiss minister Stapfer, who was also the patron of Pestalozzi.
It was only in 1804, that Girard devoted himself entirely to teaching, the very year in which Frœbel began his work. He was appointed to direct the primary school at Friburg, which had just been entrusted to the Gray Friars. Girard received the title of “prefect of studies,” and for nineteen years, from 1805 to 1823, he exercised his functions as a teacher in that school. Very small in the beginning, the school had a remarkable growth. There was added to it even a school for girls. At first Girard had Gray Friars for colleagues; but he soon replaced them with lay teachers, who obeyed him better and devoted themselves more entirely to their task. The teacher of drawing was a Protestant.
549. Success of the School at Friburg.—A disciple and an admirer of Girard, the pastor Naville, has related in his work on Public Education[228] the brilliant results obtained by Girard in his school at Friburg.
“He had trained a body of youth the like of which perhaps no city in the world could furnish. It was not without a profound emotion that the friends of humanity contemplated a spectacle so new and so touching. That ignorant and boorish class, full of prejudices, which everywhere abounds, was no longer met with at Friburg.... The young there developed graces of an amiable deportment which were never marred by anything disagreeable in tone, speech, or manner. If, seeing children approaching you covered with rags, you approached them thinking that you were about to encounter little ruffians, you were wholly surprised to have them reply to you with politeness, with judgment, and with that accent which bespeaks genteel manners and a careful education.... You will find the explanation in the school, when you observe the groups where these same children exercise by turns, as in playing, their judgment and their conscience. Three or four hours a day employed in this work gave the young that intelligence, those sentiments, and those manners which delighted you.”
550. The Last Years of the Père Girard.—Notwithstanding the success of his instruction, the Père Girard was obliged to abandon the charge of his school in 1823. His loss of position was the result of the intrigues of the Jesuits, whose college had been re-established in 1818. He left Friburg amid universal regrets, and retired to Lucerne, where he taught philosophy till 1834. At that date he returned to his native city and lived a life of seclusion. It was then that he wrote his pedagogical works. But through his disciples, and particularly through the pastor Naville, the methods of the Père Girard were known before he had published anything.
551. Teaching of the Mother Tongue.—Let us now examine the general spirit of the pedagogy of Girard. It is in the theoretical work which he published in 1844, and which was crowned by the French Academy in the same year, that we must look for the principles of his method. It consisted in “choosing a study which may be considered as one essential part of the instruction common to all the classes of society, and which nevertheless is fit for calling into exercise all the intellectual powers.” This study was the mother tongue, which Girard employed for the moral and religious development of children.
Villemain, in his report on the books of Girard, has clearly defined the purpose of the common school as conceived by the educator of Friburg:—