Young Subjects by Julia M. Gossard

Author:Julia M. Gossard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

LEARNING AT LA TRINITÉ

La Trinité’s school règlemens were similar to the eighteenth-century Lyonnais règlemens, with few departures from how to best teach reading, writing, and mathematics to children for “applications to the arts and trades.”61 However, La Trinité organized its students differently from the Lyonnais charity schools. Instead of dividing children into bandes, or classes, according to their previous knowledge and abilities, age played a larger role in organizing children into groups at the hospital-orphanage, with those under ten constituting one group; those between ten and eleven another; and those over the age of twelve another. No diagnostic tests were given to children to test their abilities. Children entered into the age group, either well prepared or far behind their peers. Within these age groups, children were then divided among gendered lines, with a group for girls and a group for boys. This insistence on separating the sexes reflected the monarchy’s obsession with separate-sex classrooms and schools for Lyonnais children. Due to a lack of space in the hospital-orphanage, though, boys and girls were rarely completely separated from one another. Furthermore, the maîtres for each age group taught both boys and girls, often teaching a group lesson and then focusing in on gender-specific lessons. For example, in one of the only remaining lessons from La Trinité, for the eldest age group, the maître reported that he had students practice multiplication. While girls were required to memorize different times tables, boys practiced using multiplication in different business components, such as calculating a difference in measurement.62 So even though the general lesson would have been the same, there were ways in which the maîtres made the lessons more gender specific.

The règlemens indicate that the “advanced students,” meaning those with knowledge in the subject, were “required to help other children who demonstrated ignorance or difficulty with the subject.”63 Conducting a large lecture and then assigning children various lessons, the teacher or teachers would circulate the room, checking on individual students’ progress. With as many as sixty students in one group, this was a large task. In order to facilitate learning, the more advanced children had to act as teachers to the less advanced children. This provided children the opportunity to both demonstrate a mastery of skill over reading, writing, and arithmetic as well as to learn how to work, collaborate with, and teach others in groups – a good skill to know when they entered apprenticeship.

Little evidence remains to provide details of the identities and backgrounds of schoolmasters and mistresses let alone what they taught and assigned in their classrooms. It is nearly impossible to determine if the education in the classrooms deviated from the règlemens or if the educational guidelines were strictly followed. Based on remarks from apprenticeship masters who contracted former enfants de l’état, regardless of whether or not the educational model was followed, the education resulted in “particularly well prepared” apprentices who were “skilled in reading and mathematics.”64

Just as Lyonnais charity schoolchildren did, enfants de l’état also served as teachers to the wider community and as agents of the Catholic Reformation.

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