St. John Baptist de La Salle

Who they were

John Baptist de La Salle was a wealthy canon of Reims drawn, almost against his own plans, into the problem of what happened to poor boys who could not read. Once he was in, he went all the way down: he gave away his fortune during the famine of 1684, moved in with the rough schoolmasters his own class despised, and founded the Brothers of the Christian Schools.

His innovations are simply how school works now. Teaching in French rather than Latin. Students grouped in classes by ability and taught all at once, which is the classroom itself, replacing tutoring one boy at a time. The first colleges for training teachers. Sunday courses for working teenagers. All of it free, which earned him lawsuits from the paid writing masters' guilds he was undercutting. He died on Good Friday in 1719, was canonized in 1900, and in 1950 Pius XII named him patron of all teachers of youth.

Why people turn to St. John Baptist de La Salle

Every teacher, whose universal patron he formally is, which puts him at the head of a long shelf: St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, St. John Neumann, St. Joseph Calasanz, St. Madeleine Sophie Barat, St. Marguerite Bourgeoys and St. Katharine Drexel. And reformers being sued by the arrangement they are improving on.

How to ask their intercession

For a teacher by name at the start of the year, and again in its exhausted middle, which is when they actually need it.