Page:Jesuit Education.djvu/457

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
TRAINING OF THE JESUIT TEACHER.
437

perfection of that virtue, which St. Ignatius recommended when saying, one should not wait for the Superior's command, but should anticipate his very suggestions and silent wishes.

In the second place Father Sacchini exhorts the teacher to devote generously his whole life to this great work. Some writers on the history of education have stated that the Jesuits, after having been admitted to Priest's Orders, did not teach the grammar classes, but gave only the higher instruction.[1] Compayré goes so far as to assert that "in their establishments for secondary instruction they entrust the lower classes to teachers who do not belong to their Order, and reserve to themselves the direction of the higher classes."[2] This is utterly false. Lay teachers are only employed when the insufficiency in the number of Jesuits makes it necessary; or for certain branches, as commercial branches, or in professional courses, as in the faculties for Law and Medicine, preparatory schools for Army and Navy, in short, wherever lay experts are needed. The history of Jesuit schools, old and new, refutes the statement of Compayré and other writers. Many priests have taught the lower classes for many years, some for their whole lives. Besides, if priests did not teach these classes, the regulations of the Ratio about "permanent teachers," the earnest appeals of Sacchini and other Jesuit writers, would be altogether meaningless.

Father Sacchini, in order to encourage the Jesuits to devote their whole lives to this noble work, enumerates the various emoluments accruing from this perseverance to the teacher himself, as it gives him

  1. Quick, Educational Reformers, p. 36, note a.
  2. History of Pedag., p. 143.