St. John Baptist de la Salle

Saint John Baptist de La Salle (1651 – 1719) opened his first school in Reims, his birthplace in northeastern France, in 1679. He was convinced that without Christian schools, poor children would be lost both to the church and to civil society. His initial efforts led him to organize the teachers whose services he had secured into a religious community called the Brothers of the Christian Schools. Over a period of thirty years, he opened schools in several French cities and towns and worked with numerous teachers and students from various socio-economic levels. By the time of his death he had founded different types of educational institutions: primary schools, teacher training centers, boarding schools, and homes for delinquents.

Alert to the needs of his time, he was an innovator in the development of teacher training programs and in curricular and pedagogical practices. Although de La Salle’s schools were primarily for the poor, they attracted children from families of differing economic backgrounds. However, he tolerated nothing of the social segregating which was the practice of the day. He prescribed uniform management procedures for the classroom instruction of students from different social and academic levels.

De La Salle regarded a school as a community of believers working cooperatively to achieve a shared vision. De La Salle was a prolific writer and his educational ideas are embodied in several major works: Rule of the Brothers of the Christian schools, Meditations for the Time of Retreat, and the Conduct of Schools, as well as in the textbooks he wrote for students. His contributions to Catholic education led Pope Pius XII in 1950 to proclaim him the Patron of Teachers.