Calle de San Juan de la Salle

Behind this short street in the El Viso district is a French priest who decided that the children of artisans and the poor also deserved schooling. John Baptist de La Salle was born in Reims in 1651, into a well-off family, and became a canon of the cathedral. He gave up that position and shared out his inheritance to sustain an idea that was then almost revolutionary: to teach for free the children who could not pay for a schoolmaster. In 1684 he founded the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, a congregation of lay educators. His classrooms broke with the custom of one-on-one lessons and grouped pupils by level; they also taught reading in French, the children’s own language, rather than in Latin. He died in Rouen in 1719. Pope Leo XIII canonised him in 1900, and in 1950 Pius XII declared him patron of Christian educators. A few steps from this street stands one of Madrid’s major La Salle schools.