Report on attachment to Istituto Leonardo Da Vinci, Catania : September 1995

Abstract

It all began just over 300 years ago. 17th Century France was a time of “crisis for traditional elementary education..... A new manner of educating children where corporal punishment was on the decline, school attendance on the increase and schooling in the vernacular was beginning to surface". The Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter - Reformation " converged in agreement upon the importance of …. schooling ". The Jesuits already had a reputation for excellence in secondary education that was recognised throughout Europe. Girls' convent finishing schools flourished. These were run by, amongst others, nuns of the Ursuline Order. Many women were committed to the education of girls. There was no lack of schooling in France, but it was aimed at the upper strata of French Society. Battles were raged in court with Claude Joly, the Superintendent of Schools in Paris, who was opposed to the decrees of the Council of Trent to decentralize authority over teachers in the reform of the Parish Schools. Jean Baptist de la Salle was caught in the grips of this conflict between the problems of primary schooling for the poor and the forces resisting educational reform. So concerned was De La Salle with the education of the students from lower levels of French Society that he founded the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, and in his Cahier Lasallien 12 : M133.2 (a) , he encouraged his lay brothers to "have much more care for their education and for their instruction than you would have for the children of a king." (3) De La Salle envisaged his community of lay teachers as an "autonomous, centralized organization serving all of France and deliberately divorced from clerical identification and diocesan territorial limitation." Like effective managers discussed by Drucker (1988) and Peters and Waterman (1988) De La Salle worked towards a people orientated organisation which respects the individual. He struggled his entire life to train teachers, eliminate the demeaning and deductive approach of teaching, establish practical, school experience as the basis of his approach w teaching and teacher training. In Jean Baptist de la Salle's writings, most important amongst which are his ‘Meditations for the time of retreat’ and ‘Conduct of Christian schools’, he develops his vision that the teachers put themselves within the reach of the students, speak to the children on their own level, are sympathetic to the vulnerabilities of the young, are sympathetic to the difficulties of growing up are concerned for the mental, physical, social and moral development of each student.