DÉVAUD, EUGÈNE. – Priest, born in Fribourg on 7 March 1876. First an inspector of elementary schools, he later became professor and director of the normal school of his Canton. From 1910 he was professor of educational science and rector at the Catholic University of Fribourg; he died there in 1944. D., a Swiss and a Catholic, found himself confronted by the assertions of the “new schools,” which in Switzerland had received, and still receive, acceptance and support.
The problem that D. poses in confronting the affirmation of the “active” school is to determine whether a movement such as activism, ultimately wholly bent upon “natural” man, can be reconciled with the Christian order, indeed whether the Christian order does not implicitly contain, without Christianity having therefore borrowed it from elsewhere, the activist principle of education. Methods and their technique do not constitute the whole of pedagogy: they are empty forms if within them there is not concealed a content that is our own humanity, our human and religious world, which resolves the value of the means (method) into the value of the end
(God). “If these points are neglected,” D. asserts, “the acquisition of knowledge is merely a harmful and deceptive exercise.” The old school, which D. calls “passive,” was based entirely on means, neglecting the ends of human life. The “new” school, however, is no different in this respect. It seems to D. that the active school strives “to make the child materially self-reliant, without doubt, but above all spiritually so.” Now, if this aim is considered as the conclusion of the education of the intellect, it is insufficient and outside the Christian order, because “it remains too exclusively bound to man’s adaptation to material realities.” D., in agreement with Foerster, believes that the methods which educate the child’s abilities to manage skillfully and to make the best use of the resources offered by the environment are indeed good; but it is not from them that the greatest educational force springs. This arises rather “from the great supra-individual truths, from the supreme ends clearly established, which link the passing and wavering being to something that stands above temporal effort and above fragile and ever-changing human opinions” (Foerster). God, as the end of man and of life, must be the center of the school; the various forms of activist schools, on the other hand, have generally established their curricula with man, both as individual and as society, at the center. In an active school according to the Christian order, as conceived by D., the teacher has a quite particular function, anything but secondary or negative. If “the true causes of the pupil’s intellectual formation are external, truth is within: the intellect, being ordered to truth, approaches it with eager and spontaneous movement,” the teacher’s task is to strive “to present the truth to the boy in such a way that he recognizes it as true, is ‘captivated’ by it, loves it, desires it, opens his intellect to it, and effectively prepares himself to submit his person and life to it.”
Works: L'école primaire sous la République helvétique 1779-1804 (Fribourg 1904); L'enseignement de l'histoire naturelle à l'école primaire (Lausanne 1909; Namur 1935); La correction des défectueuses du parler (Lausanne 1911); La pédagogie scolaire en Russie soviétique (Paris 1932); Pour une école active selon l'ordre chrétien (There 1934; Italian translation, Brescia 1940); Pédagogie du cours supérieur (Fribourg 1935); Le système Decroly et la pédagogie chrétienne (Namur 1935; Italian translation, Brescia 1940, constitutes part 2 of the volume: Per una scuola attiva secondo l'ordine cristiano); Quarante exercises de lecture silencieuse (Namur and Lausanne 1937); L'école affirmatrice de vie (Namur and Fribourg 1936); Les leçons de pédagogie d'un manuel de lecture américain (Tamines and Lausanne 1939); Pédagogie à ciel ouvert : le Chauvène Manjon et les écoles de l'Axe Maria de Grenade (Fribourg 1939).