La Salle and master-teacher training: the guidelines contained in the guide of the christian schools for the arithmetics education

Abstract

The  Christian Schools’ Brothers, better known as Lasallians, have their institutional trajectory tied to the teacher training’s history. La Salle is credited with creating the first normal school in the model as we have  today. In this article we propose to present and analyze elements about the formation of the first masters-teachers who taught to read, write and count. This study is in the field of History of Mathematics Education and takes as its historical source, the work of La Salle, the Christian Schools’ Guide of 1706, translated into Portuguese in 2012 by Brother Edgard Hengemüle. It was noticed, among other things, that through La Salle  the arithmetic teaching starts to have the same level of reading and writing in schools for the poor in seventeenth-century France. The arithmetic teaching aims at preparing for work and life. It is essentially through the repetition and reading, the numerals memorization  with the aid of posters, as well as the copying and the exercise of the four operations with emphasis on the use of money. The  arithmetic teachingintegrates a broader formation of humanistic character, focused on the soul salvation and God’s glorification.