Who Is De La Salle?

John Baptist de La Salle was born in Reims in France in 1651. He was born into a rich family and never had to worry about money or school. When he was a young boy, he announced that he wanted to be a priest.He always had a strong faith in God. The tonsure was a sign that you wanted to become a priest and the sign was marked on you by having part of your head shaved. He got the tonsure when he was 11.

De La Salle was so good in his studies that became Canon of the Cathedral in Reims when he was only sixteen years old. Sadly,his parents died in a short time of each other and he had to return home to look after his brothers and sisters. He still worked hard at his studies and he was ordained a priest in 1678.

While he worked as a priest in Reims , De La Salle saw lots of poor people all around him. He saw the poor children on the streets , begging for food and looking for scraps . There was a terrible famine in France at the time and many people were starving on the streets. The county was still trying to recover from the plague , which had killed a lot of people in the 1600s. He saw young boys on the streets with no education.

If you wanted to go to school back then,you had to pay money and go to a private school. So if you had no money, you couldn't go to school. Poor families could not afford to do that. A group of nuns called" The Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus " set up a small school for girls,where they learned things like sewing,knitting,cooking, and good manners, which were skills that they would need to be able to get a husband. But no one was educating the boys. So the poor boys ended up on the streets begging and searching for scraps of food.

In 1679, a man called Adrien Nyel was interested in setting up a small school for the poor boys on Reims and he asked De La Salle to help him. He invited Adrien Nyel to come and live with him and together they opened a school. That's how John Baptist became involved in education. Bit by bit, even though the things that were happening were small at the time, De La Salle was making decisions that wouldn't just change his life - but the whole world. As time went on, he felt a calling from God and decided that this would be how he would help the poor. He felt that in his job as the canon of the cathedral in Reims, he wasn't able to do enough to help the poor. but this would be a way to help.