INTRODUCTION This Third Volume of Our Study Has a Good Chance, We Think, of Holding the Attention of the Reader -- And, Indee
INTRODUCTION This third volume of our study has a good chance, we think, of holding the attention of the reader -- and, indeed, of the secular reader -- in a special way. It is, of course, like its predecessors, addressed primarily to the sons of St. John Baptist de La Salle; and research done by a number of the members of their Congregation assumes an important role in it. We would be failing in our primary obligation should we neglect to use the "family" documentation, unpublished and fascinating, that the Christian Brothers were kind enough to place at our disposition. On the other hand the volume preserves a sort of technical quality: we have made our modest contribution to the history of education. But, in the period we are studying, pedagogical principles and problems present, more so than the distant past, a vital, general and ever "current" interest; indeed, they arise in pretty much the same language as in our own times. The concerns for the future of youth aroused in most of our contemporaries, the struggle that is, unfortunately, conducted over the minds of the young, the heirs to our purposes and our beliefs, have, since 1789, taken on the form as well as the fury and the harshness that they have retained well into the 20th century. Philosophers of "national" education and lawmakers in modern states have drawn upon the concepts that we have already ex mined in Locke, Jean- Jacques Rousseau, the "Encyclopedists" and La Chalotais. Confronting them, and without ignoring the need for change, the champions of the religious tradition have defended freedom of conscience and the rights of divine truth at the cost of heroic efforts and suffering that have included the shedding of their blood.
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