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Petites écoles de Port-Royal
 
 
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The Petites écoles de Port-Royal was the name given to a teaching system set up in 1637 by the intellectuals who gathered at Port-Royal-des-Champs in the middle of the 17th century at the height of the Jansenist controversy. They functioned until 1660.

monastery of Port-Royal-des-Champs was more or less abandoned in favour of that in Paris (for health reasons - the site was malaria
Malaria

Malaria is a Vector -borne infectious disease caused by protozoan parasites. It is widespread in Tropics and subtropical regions, including parts of the Americas, Asia, and Africa....
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 Jansenism Catholic priest, best known as a member of the Jansenist community at Port-Royal-des-Champs and as head of the Petites ?coles de Port-Royal ....
.






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The Petites écoles de Port-Royal was the name given to a teaching system set up in 1637 by the intellectuals who gathered at Port-Royal-des-Champs in the middle of the 17th century at the height of the Jansenist controversy. They functioned until 1660.

Origine

The monastery of Port-Royal-des-Champs was more or less abandoned in favour of that in Paris (for health reasons - the site was malaria
Malaria

Malaria is a Vector -borne infectious disease caused by protozoan parasites. It is widespread in Tropics and subtropical regions, including parts of the Americas, Asia, and Africa....
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 Jansenism Catholic priest, best known as a member of the Jansenist community at Port-Royal-des-Champs and as head of the Petites ?coles 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 writing 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 speech synthesis, automated language translation, storage in a database, or comparison....
 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 was a France 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 Pascal
    Blaise Pascal

    Blaise Pascal , was a France mathematician, physicist, and religion philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a civil servant....
    , who wrote a new method of teaching children to read
  • Claude Lancelot
    Claude Lancelot

    Claude Lancelot was a Jansenist monk and grammarian.Lancelot was born in Paris. He participated in the creation of the Petites ?coles de Port-Royal in May 1638 ....
    , who wrote the famous Grammaire de Port-Royal, foundational text for the normalization
    Text normalization

    Text normalization is a process by which writing 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 speech synthesis, automated language translation, storage in a database, or comparison....
     of the French language
  • Pierre Nicole
    Pierre Nicole

    Pierre Nicole was one of the most distinguished of the French Jansenists.Born in Chartres, he was the son of a provincial barrister. Sent to Paris in 1642 to study theology, he soon entered into relations with the Jansenist community at Port-Royal-des-Champs through his aunt, Marie des Anges Suireau, who was for a short time abbess of the...
    , moralist and logician
  • Jean Hamon
    Jean Hamon (doctor)

    Jean Hamon was a French doctor and writer of many works on medical and religious subjects. A Jansenist, he also taught at the Petites ?coles de Port-Royal....
    , doctor and classicist


Sources and bibliography

Frédéric Delforge, Les petites Ecoles de Port-Royal, Paris Cerf, 1985.

External links



fr:Petites écoles de Port-Royal