[108] “A process of instruction which consists in placing beside the elements of human speech thirty-three onomatopoetic gestures, which recall to the sight the same ideas that the sounds and the articulations of the voice recall to the ear.”—Grosselin. (P.)
[CHAPTER VII.]
THE TEACHING CONGREGATIONS.—JESUITS AND JANSENISTS.
THE TEACHING CONGREGATIONS; JESUITS AND JANSENISTS; FOUNDATION OF THE SOCIETY OF JESUS (1540); DIFFERENT JUDGMENTS ON THE EDUCATIONAL MERITS OF THE JESUITS; AUTHORITIES TO CONSULT; PRIMARY INSTRUCTION NEGLECTED; CLASSICAL STUDIES; LATIN AND THE HUMANITIES; NEGLECT OF HISTORY, OF PHILOSOPHY, AND OF THE SCIENCES IN GENERAL; DISCIPLINE; EMULATION ENCOURAGED; OFFICIAL DISCIPLINARIAN; GENERAL SPIRIT OF THE PEDAGOGY OF THE JESUITS; THE ORATORIANS; THE LITTLE SCHOOLS; STUDY OF THE FRENCH LANGUAGE; NEW SYSTEM OF SPELLING; THE MASTERS AND THE BOOKS OF PORT ROYAL; DISCIPLINE IN PERSONAL REFLECTION; GENERAL SPIRIT OF THE INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION AT PORT ROYAL; NICOLE; MORAL PESSIMISM; EFFECTS ON DISCIPLINE; FAULTS IN THE DISCIPLINE OF PORT ROYAL; GENERAL JUDGMENT ON PORT ROYAL; ANALYTICAL SUMMARY.
148. The Teaching Congregations.[109]—Up to the French Revolution, up to the day when the conception of a public and national education was embodied in the legislative acts of our assembled rulers, education remained almost exclusively an affair of the Church. The universities themselves were dependent in part on religious authority. But especially the great congregations assumed a monopoly of the work of teaching, the direction and control of which the State had not yet claimed for her right.
Primary instruction, it is true, scarcely entered at first into the settled plans of the religious orders. The only exception to this statement that can properly be made, is the congregation of the Christian Doctrine, which a humble priest, Cæsar de Bus, founded at Avignon in 1592, the avowed purpose of which was the religious education of the children of the company.[110] But, on the other hand, secondary instruction provoked the greatest educational event of the sixteenth century, the founding of the company of Jesus, and this movement was continued and extended in the seventeenth century, either in the colleges of the Jesuits, ever growing in number, or in other rival congregations.
149. Jesuits and Jansenists.—Among the religious orders that have consecrated their efforts to the work of teaching, the first place must be assigned to the Jesuits and the Jansenists. Different in their statutes, their organization, and their destinies, these two congregations are still more different in their spirit. They represent, in fact, two opposite, and, as it were, contrary phases of human nature and of the Christian spirit. For the Jesuits, education is reduced to a superficial culture of the brilliant faculties of the intelligence; while the Jansenists, on the contrary, aspire to develop the solid faculties, the judgment, and the reason. In the colleges of the Jesuits, rhetoric is held in honor; while in the Little Schools of Port Royal, it is rather logic and the exercise of thought. The shrewd disciples of Loyola adapt themselves to the times, and are full of compassion for human weakness; the solitaries of Port Royal are exacting of others and of themselves. In their suppleness and cheerful optimism, the Jesuits are almost the Epicureans of Christianity; with their austere and somewhat sombre doctrine, the Jansenists would rather be the Stoics. The Jesuits and the Jansenists, those great rivals of the seventeenth century, are still face to face as enemies at the present moment. While the inspiration of the Jesuits tries to maintain the old worn-out exercises, like Latin verse, and the abuse of the memory, the spirit of the Jansenists animates and inspires the reformers, who, in the teaching of the classics, break with tradition and routine, to substitute for exercises aimed at elegance, and for a superficial instruction, studies of a greater solidity and an education that is more complete.
The merit of institutions ought not always to be measured by their apparent success. The colleges of the Jesuits, during three centuries, have had a countless number of pupils; the Little Schools of Port Royal did not live twenty years, and during their short existence they enrolled at most only some hundreds of pupils. And yet the methods of the Jansenists have survived the ruin of their colleges and the dispersion of the teachers who had applied them. Although the Jesuits have not ceased to rule in appearance, it is the Jansenists who triumph in reality, and who to-day control the secondary instruction of France.