DÉVAUD, EUGÈNE. - Priest, born at Fribourg on 7 March 1876. Initially an inspector of elementary schools, he later became a professor and director of the normal school in his canton. From 1910 he was professor of educational science and rector at the Catholic University of Fribourg; he died on 4 April 1944. Devaux, a Swiss and Catholic, confronted the assertions of the "new schools" which had found and continued to find acceptance and followers in Switzerland.
The problem that Devaux faced with the affirmation of the "active" school was whether a movement such as activistic education, which is fundamentally oriented toward the "natural" man, could be reconciled with the Christian order, or whether, within the Christian order, the activistic principle of education was implicitly present without the need for Christianity to approve II. Methods and their techniques do not constitute the entirety of pedagogy: they are empty forms if within them there is not concealed a content that is our very humanity, our human and religious world, which resolves the value of the means (method) in the value of the end.
"If these points are neglected," Devaux affirms, "the acquisition of knowledge is merely a barren and deceptive exercise." The old school, which Devaux calls "passive," was entirely based on means, neglecting the ends of human life. The "new" school is no different. To Devaux, the active school seems to strive to make the child agile—materially, no doubt, but above all spiritually. Now, if this goal is considered as the culmination of intellectual education, it is insufficient and outside the Christian order, because "it remains too exclusively tied to the adaptation of man to material realities." Devaux, in agreement with Foerster, believes that methods which educate a child's aptitudes to act skillfully and to make the best use of environmental resources are good; but the greatest educational force does not spring from them. This force rather emanates "from the great supra-individual truths, from the supreme ends clearly established, which link the fleeting and wavering being to something that stands above temporal effort and above fragile, ever-changing human opinions" (Foerster). The school must have God as its center, as the end of man and of life; the various forms of activistic schools, on the other hand, have generally fixed their curricula by centering them on man, as an individual and as a society. In an active school according to the Christian order, as conceived by Devaux, the teacher has a very special and far from secondary or negative role. If "the true causes of the intellectual formation of the pupil are external, truth is internal: the intelligence, which, being ordered to truth, turns to it with an eager and spontaneous movement," then the teacher's task is to strive to present the truth to the child in such a way that the child recognizes it as true, is "captivated" by it, loves it, desires it, opens his intelligence to it, and effectively disposes 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 défectuosités du parler* (Lausanne 1911); *La pédagogie scolaire en Russie soviétique* (Paris 1932); *Pour une école active selon l'ordre chrétien* (ibid. 1934; Italian trans., Brescia 1940); *Pédagogie du cours supérieur* (Fribourg 1935); *Le système Decroly et la pédagogie chrétienne* (Namur 1935; Italian trans. Brescia 1940, forming Part II of the volume: *Per una scuola attiva secondo l'ordine cristiano*); *Quarante exercices 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 Chauvine Manjon et les écoles de l'Ave Maria de Grenade* (Fribourg 1939).