April 7—St. John Baptist de la Salle, Priest

If you have been to a school with others in a classroom, you can thank St. John Baptist de la Salle.  If you have been in a grade, or had a core curriculum, or learned in your mother tongue, or had vocational training, or had teachers who were trained to teach, you can thank St. John Baptist de la Salle.  It is due to his innovations in education that much of what we take for granted today has been the preferred method for centuries.

St. John Baptist de la Salle was the son of wealthy parents who decided to become a priest.  It was at a chance meeting with a fellow priest who was trying to start a school to educate young girls that he began to come up with the idea to teach poor boys in a free school.  His methods of education involved teaching them in French and not Latin, with others together of similar ages rather than individually as with a tutor, and by means of separate classes that comprised a core curriculum.  He wanted them to be educated in manners and in a trade as well as in religion.  He wanted the boys to be good citizens on earth and good saints for heaven.  He founded the Brothers of the Christian Schools in the 17^th century and was named patron of school teachers in 1950.

We send our children to school in order to become good citizens, which is one of the primary purposes of St. John Baptist de la Salle’s schools and order.  But we also need to provide for their moral and religious education so that they may be saints.  We may send them to a parish religious education program, home school them, or send them to a Catholic school.  Nonetheless, our children, and we too, are citizens of two societies, that of earthly society and of heaven.  Let us follow John Baptist de la Salle in preparing our children for both.