The History of Pedagogy

by Gabriel Compayré

“As soon as children begin to have reason,” says another Jansenist, “we observe in them only blindness and weakness. Their minds are closed to spiritual things, and they cannot comprehend them. But, on the contrary, their eyes are open to evil; their senses are susceptible to all sorts of corruption, and they have a natural inertia that inclines them to it.”

“You ought,” writes Varet, “to consider your children as wholly inclined to evil, and carried forward towards it. All their inclinations are corrupt, and, not being governed by reason, they will permit them to find pleasure and diversion only in the things that carry them towards vice.”

169. Effects on Discipline.—The doctrine of the original perversity of man may produce contrary results, and direct the practical conduct of those who accept it in two opposite directions. They are either inspired with severity toward beings deeply tainted and vicious, or they are excited to pity and to tenderness for those fallen creatures who suffer from an incurable evil. The solitaries of Port Royal obeyed the second tendency. They were as affectionate and good to the children confided to their care as, in theory, they were harsh and rigorous towards human nature. In the presence of their pupils they felt touched with an infinite tenderness for those poor sick souls, whom they would willingly cure of their ills, and raise from their fall, at the cost of any and every sacrifice.

The conception of the native wickedness of man had still another result at Port Royal. It increased the zeal of the teachers. It prompted them to multiply their assiduity and vigilance in order to keep guard over young souls, and there destroy, whenever possible, the seeds of evil that sin had sown in them. When one is charged with the difficult mission of moral education, it is, perhaps, dangerous to have too much confidence in human nature, and to form too favorable an opinion of its qualities and dispositions; for then one is tempted to accord to the child too large a liberty, and to practise the maxim, “Let it take its own course, let it pass” (Laissez faire, laissez passer). It is better to err on the other side, in excess of mistrust; for, in this case, knowing the dangers that menace the child, we watch over him with more attention, abandon him less to the inspiration of his caprices, and expect more of education; we demand of effort and labor what we judge nature incapable of producing by herself.

Vigilance, patience, mildness,—these are the instruments of discipline in the schools of Port Royal. There were scarcely any punishments in the Little Schools. “To speak little, to tolerate much, to pray still more,”—these are the three things that Saint Cyran recommended. The threat to send children home to their parents sufficed to maintain order in a flock somewhat small. In fact, all whose example would have proved bad were sent away; an excellent system of elimination when it is practicable. The pious solitaries endured without complaint, faults in which they saw the necessary consequences of the original fall. Penetrated, however, as they were, with the value of human souls, their tenderness for children was mingled with a certain respect; for they saw in them the creatures of God, beings called from eternity to a sublime destiny or to a terrible punishment.

170. Faults in the Discipline of Port Royal.—The Jansenists did not shun the logical though dangerous consequences that were involved, in germ, in their pessimistic theories of human nature. They fell into an excess of prudence or of rigidity. They pushed gravity and dignity to a formalism that was somewhat repulsive. At Port Royal pupils were forbidden to thee and thou one another. The solitaries did not like familiarities, faithful in this respect to the Imitation of Jesus Christ, in which it is somewhere said that it does not become a Christian to be on familiar terms with any one whatever. The young were thus brought up in habits of mutual respect, which may have had their good side, but which had the grave fault of being a little ridiculous in children, since they forced them to live among themselves as little gentlemen, while at the same time they oppose the development of those intimate friendships, of those lasting attachments of which all those who have lived at college know the sweetness and the charm.

The spirit of asceticism is the general character of all the Jansenists. Varet declares that balls are places of infamy. Pascal denies himself every agreeable thought, and what he called an agreeable thought was to reflect on geometry. Lancelot refuses to take to the theatre the princes of Conti, of whom he was the preceptor.

But perhaps a graver fault at Port Royal was, that through fear of awakening self-love, the spirit of emulation was purposely suppressed. It is God alone, it was said, who is to be praised for the qualities and talents manifested by men. “If God has placed something of good in the soul of a child, we must praise Him for it and keep silent.” By this deliberate silence men put themselves on guard against pride; but if pride is to be feared, is indolence the less so? And when we purposely avoid stimulating self-love through the hope of reward, or through a word of praise given in due season, we run a great risk of not overcoming the indolence that is natural to the child, and of not obtaining from him any serious effort. Pascal, the greatest of the friends of Port Royal, said: “The children of Port Royal, who do not feel that stimulus of envy and glory, fall into a state of indifference.”

171. General Judgment on Port Royal.—After all has been said, we must admire the teachers of Port Royal, who were doubtless deceived on some points, but who were animated by a powerful feeling of their duty to educate, and by a perfect charity. Ardor and sincerity of religious faith; a great respect for the human person; the practice of piety held in honor, but kept subordinate to the reality of the inner feeling; devotion advised, but not imposed; a marked mistrust of nature, corrected by displays of tenderness and tempered by affection; above all, the profound, unwearied devotion of Christian souls who give themselves wholly and without reserve to other souls to raise them up and save them,—this is what was done by the discipline of Port Royal. But it is rather in the methods of teaching, and in the administration of classical studies, that we must look for the incontestable superiority of the Jansenists. The teachers of the Little Schools were admirable humanists, not of form, as the Jesuits were, but of judgment. They represent, it seems to us, in all its beauty and in all its force, that intellectual education, already divined by Montaigne, which prepares for life men of sound judgment and of upright conscience. They founded the teaching of the humanities. “Port Royal,” says an historian of pedagogy, Burnier, “simplifies study without, however, relieving it of its wholesome difficulties; it strives to make it interesting, while it does not convert it into child’s play; it purposes to confide to the memory only what has first been apprehended by the intelligence.... It has given to the world ideas that it has not again let go, and fruitful principles from which we have but to draw their logical consequences.”

[172. Analytical Summary. 1. In the history of the three great teaching congregations we have an illustration of the supposed power of education over the destinies of men.