La Salle's Small Christian Schools: Organization and Work in the First Foundation Years

Abstract

Using the works of La Salle, his commentators, and researchers on this period and education, this work aims to present his pedagogical proposal of a reformist nature, which, however, corresponded to the social needs that gradually appeared in that context. Ensured by the policies of King Louis XIV, the small Christian Schools, founded by Jean-Baptiste de La Salle, and other Catholic institutions found space for promoting their Christian pedagogy. In the Small Schools, teaching showed signs of modernity never before seen in other confessional teaching institutions. As a spiritual and intellectual guide of a group of consecrated masters, La Salle provided students with indiscriminate access to their schools, teaching them to read and write French, and training lay people to conduct classes. These actions popularized his work and the Christian civility rules he wrote and were widely read. All these factors contributed to the emergence of an education that, prioritizing the poorest layers of society, sought to reconcile in its method the traditional religious precepts with the demands of the bourgeois society of its time. The result of his work can be understood based on the popular reach of reading and writing, which allowed them to work and develop amidst the modern demands required by the social context.