Petites écoles de Port-Royal
Encyclopedia
Origin
The monastery of Port-Royal-des-Champs was more or less abandoned in favour of that in Paris (for health reasons - the site was malariaMalaria
Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease of humans and other animals caused by eukaryotic protists of the genus Plasmodium. The disease results from the multiplication of Plasmodium parasites within red blood cells, causing symptoms that typically include fever and headache, in severe cases...
l) when in 1637 Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbot of Saint-Cyran, decided to set up a school for 30 children here, headed by his friend, the priest Antoine Singlin
Antoine Singlin
Antoine Singlin was a French Jansenist Catholic priest, best known as a member of the Jansenist community at Port-Royal-des-Champs and as head of the Petites écoles de Port-Royal ....
. This school shared the building with the Solitaires, intellectuals or politicians who had decided to go into retreat to perfect their spiritual life, many of whom taught at the school.
Its teachers' intellectual calibre made Petites écoles de Port-Royal a place of intellectual excellence, but also of experimentation in teaching methods (based on French and not Latin and thus revolutionary for the time) and in normalization
Text normalization
Text normalization is a process by which text is transformed in some way to make it consistent in a way which it might not have been before. Text normalization is often performed before text is processed in some way, such as generating synthesized speech, automated language translation, storage in...
of the French language. They also withdrew from the Jesuit teaching system, which mainly taught in Latin, even when their young students had not mastered Latin. Class sizes were small (never more than 25 children) to create a teacher-pupil relationship that was very strict but also marked by trust and admiration. Discipline was very severe but many of its teaching rules demonstrate a real concern for what would later be called child psychology.
Students and teachers
Jean Racine
Jean Racine
Jean Racine , baptismal name Jean-Baptiste Racine , was a French dramatist, one of the "Big Three" of 17th-century France , and one of the most important literary figures in the Western tradition...
was taught here from 1655 to 1666, and the economist Pierre Le Pesant de Boisguilbert was also taught here.
Its teachers were also drawn from among the major intellectuals of the time:
- Blaise PascalBlaise PascalBlaise Pascal , was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen...
, who wrote a new method of teaching children to read - Claude LancelotClaude LancelotClaude Lancelot was a Jansenist monk and grammarian.Lancelot was born in Paris. He participated in the creation of the Petites écoles de Port-Royal in May 1638 .Lancelot was placed in charge of the education of the duke of Chevreuse and of the princes of Conti.Lancelot was...
, who wrote the famous Grammaire de Port-Royal, foundational text for the normalizationText normalizationText normalization is a process by which text is transformed in some way to make it consistent in a way which it might not have been before. Text normalization is often performed before text is processed in some way, such as generating synthesized speech, automated language translation, storage in...
of the French language - Pierre NicolePierre NicolePierre Nicole was one of the most distinguished of the French Jansenists.Born in Chartres, he was the son of a provincial barrister, who took in charge his education...
, moralist and logician - Jean HamonJean Hamon (doctor)Jean Hamon was a French doctor and writer of many works on medical and religious subjects. He was born in Cherbourg. A Jansenist, he taught at the Petites écoles de Port-Royal. He died in Paris....
, doctor and classicist