The History of Pedagogy

by Gabriel Compayré

But, on the other hand, the Jesuits have incurred the grave fault of detaching the child from the family. They wish to have absolute control of him. The ideal of the perfect scholar is to forget his parents. Here is what was said by a pupil of the Jesuits, who afterwards became a member of the Order, J. B. de Schultaus:—

“His mother paid him a visit at the College of Trent. He refused to take her hand, and would not even raise his eyes to hers. The mother, astonished and grieved, asked her son the cause of such a cold greeting. ‘I refuse to notice you,’ said the pupil, ‘not because you are my mother, but because you are a woman.’ And the biographer adds: ‘This was not excessive precaution; woman preserves to-day the faults she had at the time of our first father; it is always she who drives man from Paradise.’ When the mother of Schultaus died, he did not show the least emotion, having long ago adopted the Holy Virgin for his true mother.”

157. Emulation Encouraged.—The Jesuits have always considered emulation as one of the essential elements of discipline. “It is necessary,” says the Ratio, “to encourage an honorable emulation; it is a great stimulus to study.” Superior on this point, perhaps on this alone, to the Jansenists, who through mistrust of human nature feared to excite pride by encouraging emulation, the Jesuits have always counted upon the self-love of the pupil. The Ratio multiplies rewards,—solemn distributions of prizes, crosses, ribbons, decorations, titles borrowed from the Roman Republic, such as decurions and prætors; all means, even the most puerile, were invented to nourish in pupils an ardor for work, and to incite them to surpass one another. Let us add that the pupil was rewarded, not only for his own good conduct, but for the bad conduct of his comrades if he informed against them. The decurion or the prætor was charged with the police care of the class, and, in the absence of the official disciplinarian, he himself chastised his comrades; in the hands of his teacher, he became a spy and an informer. Thus a pupil, liable to punishment for having spoken French contrary to orders, will be relieved from his punishment if he can prove by witnesses that one of his comrades has committed the same fault on the same day.

158. Official Disciplinarian.—The rod is an element, so to speak, of the ancient pedagogical régime. It holds a privileged place both in the colleges and in private education. Louis XIV. officially transmits to the Duke of Montausier the right to correct his son. Henry IV. wrote to the governor of Louis XIII.: “I complain because you did not inform me that you had whipped my son; for I desire and order you to whip him every time that he shall be guilty of obstinacy or of anything else that is bad; for I well know that there is nothing in the world that can do him more good than that. This I know from the lessons of experience, for when I was of his age, I was soundly flogged.”[115]

The Jesuits, notwithstanding their disposition to make discipline milder, were careful not to renounce a punishment that was in use even at court. Only, while the Brethren of the Christian Schools, according to the regulations of La Salle, chastised the guilty pupil themselves, the Jesuits did not think it becoming the dignity of the master to apply the correction himself. They reserved to a laic the duty of handling the rods. An official disciplinarian, a domestic, a porter, was charged in all the colleges with the functions of chief executioner. And while the Ratio Studiorum recommends moderation, certain witnesses prove that the special disciplinarian did not always carry a discreet hand. Here, for example, is an account given by Saint Simon:—

“The eldest son of the Marquis of Boufflers was fourteen years old. He was handsome, well formed, was wonderfully successful, and full of promise. He was a resident pupil of the Jesuits with the two sons of d’Argenson. I do not know what indiscretion he and they were guilty of. The Fathers wished to show that they neither feared nor stood in awe of any one, and they flogged the boy, because, in fact, they had nothing to fear of the Marquis of Boufflers; but they were careful not to treat the two others in this way, though equally culpable, because every day they had to count with d’Argenson, who was lieutenant of police. The boy Boufflers was thrown into such mental agony that he fell sick on the same day, and within four days was dead.... There was a universal and furious outcry against the Jesuits, but nothing ever came of it.”[116]

159. General Spirit of the Pedagogy of the Jesuits.—The general principles of the doctrine of the Jesuits are completely opposed to our modern ideas. Blind obedience, the suppression of all liberty and of all spontaneity, such is the basis of their moral education.

“To renounce one’s own wishes is more meritorious than to raise the dead;” “We must be so attached to the Roman Church as to hold for black an object which she tells us is black, even when it is really white;” “Our confidence in God should be strong enough to force us, in the lack of a boat, to cross the ocean on a single plank;” “If God should appoint for our master an animal deprived of reason, you should not hesitate to render it obedience, as to a master and a guide, for this sole reason, that God has ordered it thus;” “One must allow himself to be governed by divine Providence acting through the agency of the superiors of the Order, just as if he were a dead body that could be put into any position whatever, and treated according to one’s good pleasure; or as if one were a bâton in the hands of an old man who uses it as he pleases.”

As to intellectual education, as they understand it, it is wholly artificial and superficial. To find for the mind occupations that absorb it, that soothe it like a dream, without wholly awakening it; to call attention to words, and to niceties of expression, so as to reduce by so much the opportunity for thinking; to provoke a certain degree of intellectual activity, prudently arrested at the place where the reflective reason succeeds an embellished memory; in a word, to excite the spirit just enough to arouse it from its inertia and its ignorance, but not enough to endow it with a real self-activity by a manly display of all its faculties,—such is the method of the Jesuits. “As to instruction,” says Bersot, “this is what we find with them: history reduced to facts and tables, without the lesson derived from them bearing on the knowledge of the world; even the facts suppressed or altered when they say too much; philosophy reduced to what is called empirical doctrine, and what de Maistre called the philosophy of the nothing, without danger of one’s acquiring a liking for it; physical science reduced to recreations, without the spirit of research and liberty; literature reduced to the complaisant explication of the ancient authors, and ending in innocent witticisms.... With respect to letters, there are two loves which have nothing in common save their name; one of them makes men, the other, great boys. It is the last that we find with the Jesuits; they amuse the soul.”

160. The Oratorians.—Between the Jesuits, their adversaries, and the Jansenists, their friends, the Oratorians occupy an intermediate place. They break already with the over-mechanical education, and with the wholly superficial instruction which Ignatius Loyola had inaugurated. Through some happy innovations they approach the more elevated and more profound education of Port Royal. Founded in 1614, by Bérulle, the Order of the Oratory soon counted quite a large number of colleges of secondary instruction, and, in particular, in 1638, the famous college of Juilly. While with the Jesuits it is rare to meet the names of celebrated professors, several renowned teachers have made illustrious the Oratory of the seventeenth century. We note the Père Lamy, author of Entretiens sur les Sciences (1683); the Père Thomassin, whom the Oratorians call the “incomparable theologian,” and who published, from 1681 to 1690, a series of Methods for studying the languages, philosophy, and letters; Mascaron and Massillon, who taught rhetoric at the Oratory; the Père Lecointe and the Père Lelong, who taught history there. All these men unite, in general, some love of liberty to ardor of religious sentiment; they wish to introduce more air and more light into the cloister and the school; they have a taste for the facts of history and the truths of science; finally, they attempt to found an education at once liberal and Christian, religious without abuse of devotion, elegant without refinement, solid without excess of erudition, worthy, finally, to be counted as one of the first practical tentatives of modern pedagogy.