Essays on Educational Reformers

by Robert Hebert Quick

§ 29. With this minimum of the essentials of the grammar and with a previous acquaintance with the sense of the book the pupils were introduced to the Latin language and were taught to translate a Latin author into French. This was a departure from the ordinary route, which after a course of learning grammar-rules in Latin went to the “theme,” i.e., to composition in Latin.

The art of translating into the mother-tongue was made much of. School “construes,” which consist in substituting a word for a word, were entirely forbidden, and the pupils had to produce the old writer’s thoughts in French.[94]

§30. From this we see that the training was literary. But in the study of form the Port-Royalists did not neglect the inward for the outward. Their great work, which still stands the attacks of time, is the Port-Royal Logic, or the Art of Thinking (see Trans, by T. Spencer Baynes, 1850). This was substantially the work of Arnauld; and it was Arnauld who led the Port-Royalists in their rupture with the philosophy of the Middle Age, and who openly followed Descartes. In the Logic we find the claims of reason asserted as if in defiance of the Jesuits. “It is a heavy bondage to think oneself forced to agree in everything with Aristotle and to take him as the standard of truth in philosophy.... The world cannot long continue in this restraint, and is recovering by degrees its natural and reasonable liberty, which consists in accepting that which we judge to be true and rejecting that which we judge to be false.” (Quoted by Cadet, p. 31.)[95]

§ 31. To mark the change, the Port-Royalists called their book not “the Art of Reasoning,” but “the Art of Thinking,” and it was in this art of thinking that they endeavoured to train their scholars. They paid great attention to geometry, and Arnauld wrote a book (“New Elements of Geometry”) which so well satisfied Pascal that after reading the MS. he burnt a similar work of his own.

§ 32. The Port-Royalists then sought to introduce into the school-room a “sweet reasonableness.” They were not touched, as Comenius was, by the spirit of Bacon, and knew nothing of a key for opening the secrets of Nature. They loved literature and resolved that their pupils should love it also; and with this end they would give the first notions of it in the mother-tongue; but the love of literature still bound them to the past, and they aimed simply at making the best of the Old Education without any thought of a New.

§ 33. In one respect they seem less wise than Rabelais and Mulcaster, less wise perhaps than their foes the Jesuits. They gave little heed to training the body, and thought of the soul and the mind only; or if they thought of the body they were concerned merely that it should do no harm. “Not only must we form the minds of our pupils to virtue,” says Nicole, “we must also bend their bodies to it, that is, we must endeavour that the body do not prove a hindrance to their leading a well-regulated life or draw them by its weight to any disorder. For we should know that as men are made up of mind and body, a wrong turn given to the body in youth is often in after life a great hindrance to piety.” (Vues p. bien élever un prince, quoted by Cadet, p. 206.)

§ 34. But let us not underrate the good effect produced by this united effort of Christian toil and Christian thought. “Nothing should be more highly esteemed than good sense,” (Preface to the Logique), and Port-Royal did a great work in bringing good sense and reason to bear on the practice of the school-room. When the Little Schools were dispersed the Gentlemen still continued to teach, but the lessons they gave were now in the “art of thinking” and in the art of teaching; and all the world might learn of them, for they taught in the only way left open to them; they published books.

§ 35. Of these writers on pedagogy the most distinguished was “the great Arnauld,” i.e., Antoine Arnauld, (1612-1694) brother of the Mère Angélique. His “Règlement des Études” shows us how literary instruction was given at Port-Royal. In these directions we have not so much the rules observed in the Little Schools as the experience of the Little Schools rendered available for the schools of the University. On this account Sainte-Beuve speaks of the Règlement of Arnauld as forming a preface to the Treatise on Studies (Traité des Études) of Rollin. In the Règlement we see Arnauld yielding to what seems a practical necessity and admitting competition and prizes. Some excellent advice is given, especially on practice in the use of the mother-tongue. The young people are to question and answer each other about the substance of what they have read, about the more remarkable thoughts in their author or the more beautiful expressions. Each day two of the boys are to narrate a story which they themselves have selected from a classical author.[96]