Descartes: A Biography

c CUNYB/Clarke     December, :

 Descartes: A Biography

who were bourgeois.Forthe most part, however, Jesuit schools reflected

the social stratification of French society in the early seventeenth century

and the lack of interest in formal education among merchants and peasants,

who did not see the benefits of having their children study Latin and Greek

forsix years, much less philosophy. While some sent their sons to school

to support their aspirations toward upward social mobility, they usually

withdrew them after first class (that is, before beginning philosophy).

La Fleche also educated Jesuit scholastics and lay pupils together in the`

same classes. It had originally been planned to establish a separate novi-

tiate for young Jesuits in an adjacent Augustinian priory, St. Jacques,

butthis plan was abandoned. The alternative was to integrate Jesuit stu-

dents into the regular school, so that by the time that Descartes reached

the philosophy classes the school included fifty-five Jesuit scholastics and

approximately one hundred Jesuits in total.One of the advantages of this

integration was that the senior Jesuit students could be used as tutors or

r ́ep ́etiteursforlaystudents. This partially explains Descartes’ comments,

in theDiscourse, that his fellow students ‘included some who were already

destined to replace our teachers’ (vi.). The sheer size of the classes, some

of which included as many as two hundred students, made it necessary to

have some kind of tutorial system in place.

The predominant style of teaching was thus very much a study of

basic texts that were accessible even to the average student. The teacher

offered an initial reading of a text, explaining the meaning of words and

the implications of obscure passages, and the students then collectively

read the texts out loud and recited them in unison. Montaigne commented

sarcastically on his school experience that ‘teachers are for ever bawling

into our ears as though pouring knowledge down through a funnel: our

task is merely to repeat what we have been told.’Other periods during

the day provided an opportunity for private revision, and the students

were then required to meet their prefect and, individually, to recite or

explain their daily quota of lessons.

During at least part of his studies, Jacques Dinet was Descartes’ princi-

pal prefect, and Etienne No ̈el was a theology student and part-time tutor

to whom he reported almost daily to show that he had completed his

lessons. The daily contact with these Jesuits explains the ease with which,

many years later, Descartes sent a copy of his first book to Father No ̈el,

and asked Father Dinet, when he was provincial superior of the Jesuits,

to help deflect or restrain the criticisms of theDioptricsthat were written