“Jansenist” ideas on education in the seventieth century and their longstanding impact on pedagogical thought in Europe

Education played an important role in the seventeenth century neo-Augustinian movement, better known as “Jansenism.” The so-called “Petites- Écoles (Small Schools) associated with the Cistercian Abbey at Port-Royal near Versailles bear witness to this; they played an important role in the reputation of this movement in educated French society at this time. Blaise and his sister Jacqueline Pascal (Sr. Euphémie) were important influences on the development of an innovative educational method. Other “Jansenist” theologians like Pierre Nicole or J. Duguet extended these pedagogical ideas to other contexts, including the education of the Christian monarch. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these “Jansenist” ideas were taken up by other German and Swiss educational thinkers and became influential on modern, “secular” theories of education. This paper highlights the importance of education and schools (both for boys and for girls) for the self-definition of a group, which became marginalized within the Catholic Church, but had a long term, little recognised, impact on pedagogical thought in France and Europe