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SPECIAL EDUCATION ACCORDING TO JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE (TEACHING THE MALADJUSTED CHILD)
Othmar Wurth, FSC
De La Salle’s original purpose in establishing Christian Schools was simply to prepare and provide teachers for the parish and the charity schools, but since his ministry was open to all, he and the Brothers had in their classes children who were disturbed and troubled, children who needed special attention and care if the school was to benefit them.
Most of these children came from among the poor and those who worked at manual tasks for a living, and De La Salle soon saw in some of them the consequences of their deprived life; sterile affections, stunted intellect, physical neglect, and a lack of moral values. He quickly realized, however, that such troubled children were found not only among the poor.
It was in response to the personally debilitating consequences of social and family deprivation and frustration that De La Salle first addressed the special educational needs of the maladjusted child.
De La Salle did not develop a systematic treatise on maladjusted children. Instead, as his experience and that of the teachers brought him into contact with children having educational or emotional needs, he concentrated on working out pedagogical solutions in terms of specific classroom procedures. His method was to create an educational environment which responded to the economic, social, and moral conditions he and the teachers found among the working class and the poor.
Most of De La Salle’s treatment for maladjusted children is described in the chapters of the Conduct of Schools dealing with methodology and discipline. Here we do not find organized groupings but rather lists identifying a variety of social, intellectual, and moral symptoms and phenomena, each with a description or comment.
While the Conduct of Schools does not organize student maladjustments into discrete categories, the remedies proposed by De La Salle do fall into categories which approach modern concepts of treatment, and it is with this in mind that the groupings that follow have been determined. The remedies proposed by De La Salle are seen as particularly relevant to the needs that the early teachers observed among their pupils. These remedies helped create the special remedial education eventually found in schools throughout France in the seventeenth and eighteenth century.
Environmental Factors Contributing to Maladjustment in Children
De La Salle’s description of the maladjusted child and the resulting deficien cies is today rather commonplace and not particularly striking. But when we take time to examine and reflect on his discussion of the causes and particularly the remedies he proposed, we recognize the breadth of his educational vision and the compassion which characterized his entire attitude toward suffering families and their children. He recognized in these children and their families the debilitating impact of the society in which they lived whatever the level.
Among the causes of the difficulties of children De La Salle clearly identified parental neglect and ignorance, preoccupation with earning a living, and a lack of religious faith in families. But instead of blaming families, De La Salle proposed clear, direct, faith-filled corrective methods that were both respectful of persons and rooted in sound psychological practices that anticipated much of what is regarded as standard today. De La Salle’s procedure was to analyze the difficulty suffered by the child, offer a solution, and create the environment in which change could be effected. The institutional environment for that change was the well-conducted school.
Disturbed Emotional Relationships in Families
De La Salle identified two types of emotional disorders. The first arises when a child has been left on his own from his early years. The second develops in the child of permissive parents who in practice “worship their children.” As a matter of fact, De La Salle considered that these two forms of effective disorder are in one way or another responsible for all deficiencies, faults, or delinquencies in children. “All disorders in children, especially among the working class and the poor, usually come from their having been left to themselves and badly brought up from their early years.” It was important, therefore, that the teacher’s authority be patient, fair, moderate, and inspired by love for each of the children. The teacher was to act as a true substitute for the father and mother.
Lack of a Role Model and of a Value System
Adjustment problems for children result not only from disturbed family relations. A role model, a mature person to admire and identify with, may be lacking in a child’s family. De La Salle made numerous references to the absence of such models in the families of the children who attended the schools of the Brothers and to a family’s lack of religious practice and religious training: “One of the main duties of fathers and mothers is to bring up their children in a Christian manner and to teach them their religion. But most parents are not sufficiently enlightened in these matters, or are too taken up with their temporal affairs.”
Furthermore, De La Salle knew that bad example abounded outside the family, and he warned that association with bad companions “teaches children to commit many sins.”
De La Salle noted that few children “go astray from malice of heart,” but many more do so from the bad example of companions they meet while wandering the streets. This problem seemed to haunt him, for he returned to it again and again. He reminded the teachers to be vigilant so that their students “avoid all bad company.” He even warned them that they ought to consider themselves “false prophets” if they did not take the trouble to find out if their students were with bad companions, passing most of their time in misconduct and licentious behavior.
Parental Neglect
De La Salle identified two types of neglect, moral and physical, and saw that many of the children in the schools suffered from one or both: “You ought to look on the children whom you are charged to teach as poor and abandoned orphans. Though most do have a father here on earth, they exist, nonetheless, as if they had none and are abandoned to themselves regarding the salvation of their souls.” One of the causes of this neglect was the economic situation, the poverty in which families lived.
De La Salle also realized that the children simply might not be properly motivated by their parents, since working class and poor parents themselves “had ordinarily little education.” A common result of the lack of education in many parents was a lack of interest in refinement of any kind, and a disregard for anything which did not immediately seem useful in easing the situation in which they lived; school was ignored. The ultimate consequences for children were often illiteracy, frustration, and idleness.
The teachers inevitably had in their classes a certain percentage of dull or slow students. De La Salle noted in the Conduct of Schools that parents of these children, particularly not seeing any value in education, frequently failed to send their children to school, or made little or no effort to make them apply themselves. He wrote that they “do not hesitate to take their children out of school prematurely in order to put them to work to help the family.”
De La Salle was also concerned about remedying the indifference to cultural values, including the rules of civility and politeness, that children acquired at home. He was determined to make children recognize by the example and the quality of the teachers that these values were not negligible but constituted a considerable advantage. He did not consider it enough that the children gain religious and secular information; it was also important to De La Salle that the students model their lives on those of their teachers.
Physical condition and poor health were other indications to De La Salle of parental neglect. He insisted that children be properly clothed when they come to school. That students were obliged to bring their breakfast and lunch to school suggests that De La Salle recognized a lack of hygiene, of good diet, and of good upbringing in some families. The Conduct of Schools prescribed that when a student was admitted the parents were required to have him properly clothed and that they were not to send him to school unless he was “wearing proper and clean clothes,” with his hair “well combed and free of lice.” If parents did not cooperate in these matters, however, De La Salle recommended that rather than keeping those children out of school they be seated in such a way “that those whose parents are negligent and those children who have lice be separated from those who are clean and who do not have them.”
Malnutrition and the lack of hygiene were the causes of several illnesses. De La Salle makes reference in particular to scrofula and ringworm. For hygienic reasons, he prescribed that no student was to be received into the school who had any infectious disease, among which he included epilepsy, then regarded as contagious. If it happened that any student contracted one of these illnesses, “He must be seen by the house doctor. If the problem is so diagnosed, he will be suspended from school until he is cured, assuming the illness is curable.”
The overall remedy envisioned by De La Salle to assist these maladjusted children was to counter adverse environmental conditions through the Christian School and the person of the teacher, who would identify with the poor, and “by the grace of God” serve as a model for them and help the family.
Other Factors Contributing to Maladjustment
Even a cursory reading of the sources will show that as he immersed himself in the work of the schools and the life of the working class, De La Salle grew increasingly sensitive to the disturbed and troubled child, and that he analyzed carefully the cases which came to his attention in terms which often anticipated modern insights and categories.
Though specific categories of troubled children identified by De La Salle appear for the most part only in random listings in his writings, they can for our purpose here be grouped into three general types. In effect, De La Salle believed that weakness of character, inappropriate behavior, and low intelligence contributed to maladjustment.
Weakness of Character
De La Salle was a realist, and though he did not believe that there were many corrupted or immoral children in the schools of the Brothers, he recognized that there would be some. “There are children,” he wrote, “who go astray through malice of heart.” Others, he said, “have a bad attitude which leads them eventually into malice,” while some “have evil inclinations, what might be called defects of the heart.”
The moral or character deficiencies De La Salle identified can be placed under five headings, though these categories are not always readily distinguishable from one another in his writings.
Some children are irresponsible. De La Salle considered that this condition begins with childish misbehavior but grows into a more serious instability which discourages a child from whatever demands serious attention; it can lead to truancy. Another manifestation of this weakness of character is that displayed by the headstrong child. Going beyond mere persistent misbehavior, these children “do only what they want from morning to night, determined to have their own will, and have no respect for parents or religion.”
Uncorrected, irresponsible and headstrong children could become incorrigible. Such children, De La Salle wrote, “though corrected a great number of times, simply refuse to reform their conduct.” This maladjustment could lead to irreligion, and these irreligious children soon neglect “all prayer and the sacraments, are disrespectful in church, and prefer bad company, which surely leads them into habitual sin.” Children with such character disorders De La Salle identified as licentious; their serious moral failings include lying, stealing, sexual misconduct, and fighting.
Inappropriate Behavior
Behavioral maladjustments, as De La Salle described them, arose from home training or poor classroom practice by a teacher. They developed into educational problems through accumulation or persistency.
The most familiar of these is perhaps flightiness, arising not from malice, but from thoughtlessness. Such children, said De La Salle, “ordinarily do not reflect, and lack all control.” Shortly after being corrected, they will repeat the mistake, or make a similar one, meriting the same punishment. Flightiness is sometimes a cause of truancy. A more serious problem is the spoiled child. De La Salle felt that parents were often too willing to yield to the whims and demands of their children and seemed afraid to trouble the child or were reluctant to trouble themselves. Some parents, he once remarked, even worshiped their children.
Another serious behavioral problem is stubbornness. “One child,” De La Salle wrote, “resists the teacher who seeks to correct him,” “another complains,” “another grumbles or cries.” Another kind of maladjusted behavior to which De La Salle often alluded is boldness, or lack of respect. Although he did not clarify these particular terms except indirectly when writing on the subject of punishment, he seems to have meant children who were insolent in almost every situation, and determined to resist any authority.
Low Intelligence
De La Salle’s comments and ideas on intelligence must be interpreted with great care. While manifestations of weakness of character and inappropriate behavior are familiar enough in our own day, our concept of intelligence is very much affected by modern ideas of academic and “intelligence” testing. Nonetheless, what De La Salle observed here will have relevance when his solutions for the slow or maladjusted learner are examined, though his language lacks modern psychological nuance.
According to De La Salle: “these students usually do not follow the lesson well, do not read well, do not remember well, learn little or nothing. Some children are so dull that they cannot repeat very well an answer that several others have recited one after the other. There are some who are slow and who cannot follow a thought.”
In numerous passages in the Conduct of Schools, De La Salle alluded to the difficulties some students have in memorizing or even paying regular attention to the lesson. Some “follow the first idea that comes to their mind or imagination,” and there are others “for whom learning does not come easy, who do not memorize well, or cannot retain for long what they have finally learned.” De La Salle also recognized a specific reading problem, which today we call dyslexia, when he noted that some children were “liable to reverse letters, saying for example OM for MO.”
The common, tuition-free parish school, in which for the most part De La Salle and the early teachers worked, soon developed an environment within which maladjusted children found security and help. The characteristics of this environment will be discussed in the following month’s article.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
- What are the family backgrounds from which your students come? Are the special educational needs of these students being met by your school?
- How are the students with special educational needs identified in your school? Do you include the parents of these students in planning your educational programs?
- Do you take seriously your responsibility of being a role model for your students? What do your students think of you? Do they know that you care for them?
- Are you, as De La Salle did, growing increasingly sensitive to the disturbed and troubled student in your classroom? What kinds of special care do you give these students?
- De La Salle seemed to have a special love for the “maladjusted child” -- the child who had special educational and/or emotional needs. Have you created an educational environment in your school which responds to the economic, social and moral conditions as well as the educational needs of these students?
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