Loyola and the Educational System of the Jesuits

by Thomas Hughes

As to its ulterior evolution, I may designate two forms which the system has been invited to assume. Rather, I may point to an epoch in its history, at which general and universal education divided off into two lines; and, by one or other way, almost all the secondary and superior education, which prevails amongst us, reaches our present time. The principles adopted on one side, however extravagant they may have been at their first adoption and in all the glow and fervor of a new departure, will certainly recommend themselves to some. The other was practically, if it has not as yet been formally, adopted by the Order as a continuation of its old method, and as a revision in the nineteenth century of what itself had laid down in the fifteenth. I will quote, to explain one of the movements, a writer, M. Drevon, whom I cited once before,[350] chiefly because he is quite recent, and also because he is entirely out of sympathy with the system of the Jesuits. For the other, I will quote one of the latest Generals of the Society of Jesus, Father John Roothaan.

When the Jesuit colleges, more than ninety in number, were abruptly closed in France, then, says the first writer, "the departure of the Jesuits was the occasion of a noisy demonstration against the instruction which had been imparted in the colleges. A multitude of books[351] were at once seen pouring into the market, presenting plans for a new system of education, which should be more in keeping with the progress of Science and Philosophy. Men of the gravest authority, like the President Roland, did not disdain to occupy themselves with these matters, and to enter into details: 'The moment was come,' cried one of them, 'to set up furnaces, to add bellows thereto, and initiate scholars into the doctrine of gases.'[352] The reaction was so much the more violent, as spirits had been the longer suppressed. It went even beyond the just measure, as happens almost always in such circumstances; so that, says a contemporary writer,[353] children, properly instructed, ought to have become, at the age of fifteen, agriculturists sufficiently well qualified, intelligent naturalists, prudent economists, shrewd business men, enlightened politicians, profound metaphysicians, prodigious geometricians, without prejudice to writing and drawing, to universal geography, and ancient as well as modern history; without prejudice to the French language, English also and German and a little Latin; and again without prejudice to music and heraldry, to dancing and fencing, to horsemanship, and, above all, to swimming. But people had not long to wait before deploring such excess. All this agitation proved unfortunately sterile; and as I have just said, on the eve of the French Revolution, secondary education had not taken a step forward during fifty years....

"It came to a new birth in 1808, and found itself very much where it had been, before this long sleep. Napoleon declared that the new method of the University was very like that of the ancient University of Paris; only that the courses 'left something to desire with regard to drawing, modern languages, geography, history, and especially mathematical and physical sciences.' This was progress, no doubt, and it is well to grant it. But Napoleon is mistaken, when he pretends that the new University is a child of the ancient one. It is preëminently a child of the Jesuits. For, as we have remarked, the Jesuits, at the beginning, took great care to make no innovations. They accepted, as they found them, the old methods, introduced little by little their own mode of procedure, an alteration most calculated to assure their influence and their success. The grand old University which went down to the second rank, so to say, in public education, submitted to the influence of its detested and triumphant rivals, and, in spite of itself, it allowed itself to be permeated by their methods. Hence, in 1808, at the moment when Napoleon dreams that he is reëstablishing the University, the ideal of public instruction was a mixture of the old university traditions and the empiric methods of the Jesuits."[354]

It does not come within the scope of this writer to indicate how, from this historical point of divergence, the modern practical method of instruction came to be fully organized. Each system went its own way. I pass on to the other line, or rather back to the Jesuit Ratio; and I will merely point out what process of adjustment it then underwent.

In 1832, Father Roothaan, General of the Society, addressed an encyclical letter to the Order. To give an abstract of it, he says: "In the very first assembly after the restoration of the Society, a petition had been received from the Provinces, and daily experience since then has shown it to be more and more necessary, that the System of Studies should be accommodated to the exigencies of the times. After a consultation, involving much labor and accurate study, a form of revised Ratio has been drawn up, which is now offered for use and practice, in order that after being amended again if necessary, or else enlarged, it may receive the sanction of a universal law. The undertaking was approached with the greatest reverence for a System which had been approved by two centuries of successful operation, and which had been extolled, not unfrequently, by the very enemies of the Order.

"Of the novelties which had been introduced into the method of educating youth, during the last fifty years or more, was it forsooth possible that all could be approved and adopted in our schools? New methods and new forms invented day after day, a new arrangement of matter and of time, often self-contradictory and mutually repugnant—how could all this be taken as a rule for our studies?

"In the higher schools or in the treatment of the graver studies, it is a subject of lamentation with prudent men that there is no solidity but much show,—an ill-arranged mass of superfluous knowledge, very little exact reasoning—; that the sciences, if you except Physics and Mathematics, have not made any true progress, but are in general confusion, so that where the final results of truth are to be found scarcely appears. The study of Logic and severe Dialectics is almost in contempt, whence errors come to be deeply rooted in the minds of men who are not otherwise illiterate; and these errors, by some fatality or other, are made much of, as if they were ascertained truths, and they are lauded to the skies, because nothing is treated with strictness and accuracy, no account is made of definitions and distinctness of reasoning. Thus, tasting lightly of philosophical matters, young men go forth utterly defenceless against sophistry, since they cannot even see the difference between a sophism and an argument.

"In the lower schools, the object kept in view is to have boys learn as many things as possible, and learn them in the shortest time, and with the least exertion possible. Excellent! But that variety of so many things and so many courses, all lightly sipped of by youth, enables them to conceive a high opinion of how much they know, and sometimes swells the crowd of the half-instructed, the most pernicious of all classes to the Sciences and the State alike. As to knowing anything truly and solidly, there is none of it. Something of everything: nothing in the end.[355] Running through the courses of letters in no time, tender in age, with minds as yet untrained, they take up the gravest studies of Philosophy and the Higher Sciences; and, possessing themselves therein of scarcely any real fruit, they are only captivated by the enjoyment of greater liberty; they run headlong into vice, and are soon to become teachers themselves of a type, which, to put it as gently as possible, I will call immature.

"As to the methods, ever easier and easier, which are being excogitated, whatever convenience may be found in them, there is this grave inconvenience; first, that what is acquired without labor adheres but lightly to the mind, and what is summarily gathered in is summarily forgotten; secondly, and this, though not adverted to by many, is a much more serious injury, almost the principal fruit of a boy's training is sacrificed, which is, accustoming himself from an early age to serious application of mind, and to that deliberate exertion which is required for hard work.

"In some points, however, which do not concern the substance of education, the necessities of our times require us to modify the practice of our predecessors. And to consult the requirements of such necessities, far from being alien to our principles, is altogether in keeping with the Institute.