Lasallian Education: Which Kind of Education is It?

Edgard Hengemüle, FSC

Translated by Rose M. Beal, PhD
Foreward by Edgar Genuíno Nicodem, FSC
Edited by William Mann, FSC

ABSTRACT

Today, spread across all the continents of the world, approximately 80,000 educators take inspiration from the
practices lived and above all the principles defended during the early years of the Lasallian work. It is normal
that, amongst them, the most spontaneous inclination would be to give John Baptist de La Salle an eminently
positive reading and to attribute to him ideas and, above all, practices which could only have developed and
become a reality later, even much later.

The most important thing in this is that these men and women educators want, with greater or lesser intensity,
to carry out appropriately in today’s world the original intuitions of De La Salle. But to do that authentically one
cannot begin with what one thinks De La Salle thought or did or what one would like him to have thought or
have done. It is necessary to try to know, to the extent that history allows, what his creative intuitions were and
how he instantiated them in the conditions of his time. It is necessary to know, as precisely as possible, what he
truly understood education to mean, with what end he practiced it, to whom he directed it, how he characterized
it, and with what measures he brought it about.

Responding to all these questions is a task that exceeds the aspirations of the present text. In it, obviously, elements
that help to clarify these various points will be touched upon. But what it intends to do is to respond with
a certain breadth to the question referring to what effectively characterized the education thought and practiced
by De La Salle more than three hundred years ago.