Педагоги призваны использовать пример маркиза де Лафайета для воспитания детей

Submitted by Richard Ingram, a longtime resident of LaGrange and Chair of Friends of Lafayette. Lafayette is a template for how to win friends and influence people. The story as to how this came to be is easily accessible. Teachers, beginning in pre-kindergarten, could serve children well by introducing Lafayette, and each year thereafter peeling back a deeper layer. Lafayette is an uncontrived example of purpose, integrity, and courage. He understood the value of service and sacrifice. Pre-kindergarten, some may argue, is too early to present the likes of Lafayette, but minds even at that age have been already considerably influenced, tilting to self-absorption and in need of correction. Lafayette’s story studied is like literary criticism, a kind of wisdom literature, “a meditation upon life,” to use Professor Harold Bloom’s phrase. Bloom himself is an example of what a young mind can handle. “I first read ‘Moby Dick’ in the early summer of 1940,” he said, “before I turned ten.” He read “War and Peace” at age eleven. Maybe he was ahead of his class, but he speaks to what his class was capable of. Thumb through The McGuffey Readers to get a taste of setting the bar high at an early age. Longinus wrote “On the Sublime.” He says that sublime literature transcends and enlarges its readers. The sublime is of such “excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire admiration or awe.” The arc of Lafayette’s life measures up, and the details of his life are nuts and bolts from which to take example. Bloom says America’s two great original writers, on whose shoulders today’s writers stand, are Herman Melville (“Moby Dick,” 1851) and Walt Whitman (“Leaves of Grass,” 1855). The train of literary influence starts with Marlowe who influenced Shakespeare who influenced Milton who influenced everybody downstream. Lafayette is an influencer of a different kind, his life demonstrative, as Charles Swann said of Mme Verdurin in Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” of “nobility of heart, of a loftiness of soul.” Swann added, “you know, there are only two classes of people, the magnanimous ones and all the rest.” Lafayette is in the former category. Many men and women may qualify whose lives are sublime, who merit our attention in service to improving our own contributions to the common good; but the list need not be exhaustive. “What a scholar one might be,” Gustave Flaubert said to his mistress, “if one knew well only some half dozen books,” although, as Vladimir Nabokov points out, ”one should notice and fondle the details.” Lafayette offers a frame of reference for study of the sublime. It is curious that this cosmopolitan, wealthy, Catholic, French aristocrat should have become so popular in America, home to mostly farmers and merchants who sat in Protestant pews and had republican dispositions. Silas Deane, on granting nineteen-year-old Lafayette a commission as a major general in the Continental Army, December 7, 1776, said “his high birth, his alliances, the great dignities which his family hold at court, his considerable estates in this realm” made him useful. This was Lafayette’s point of entry. His presence and high visibility added authenticity and legitimacy to the Continental Army, despite its shortcomings compared to the French Army. Similarly, Timothy Matlack, President of the American Philosophical Society, writing to Lafayette on January 27, 1781, argued that his, Lafayette’s, election to the APS would “add a dignity which will make it truly honorable.” His merit for induction was marginal, qualified by the simultaneous induction of his uncle Marquis de Chastellux, a bona fide scholar. What endeared Lafayette to his French and American colleagues, says Professor Llloyd Kramer, was his personal style. Lafayette was self-deprecating and attentive. On October 14, 1777, he wrote to General Washington: “I shall conduct myself entirely by your advices, and if you say something is proper I’ll do it directly---I desire only to know your opinion.” This was a far cry from the arrogance and entitlement exhibited by many of his French compatriots. Lafayette was three months into his stay in America when George Washington wrote to Continental Congress President Henry Laurens on November 1, 1777, to say that Lafayette “is sensible---discreet in his manners---has made great proficiency in our language and possesses a large share of bravery and military ardor.” Having observed Lafayette for nearly a year, Washington wrote to Gouverneur Morris on July 24, 1778: “I do most devoutly wish that we had not a single foreigner among us, except the Marquis de Lafayette who acts upon very different principles than those which govern the rest.” To the Minister of Navy Gabriel de Sartine, on November 5, 1778, Admiral d’Estaing said Lafayette was always respectful of American leaders and “proposed his ideas to them only as doubts, insisted only as much as necessary, and sacrificed his views to opinions that are accepted solely on the American continent and that anywhere else would at least be called very false prejudices.” D’Estaing was incredulous at Lafayette’s malleability. Again, writing to Sartine, he commented that Lafayette “becomes accustomed to using a knife as a spoon, doing without napkins, drinking to the health of ten persons with each drop one swallows, quenching one’s thirst with grog.” On February 21, 1780, Lafayette wrote a memo to the expeditionary force under Rochambeau’s command, which was preparing to embark for America. Show more respect to American Army and Navy officers, he wrote, than you would to Prussian officers or even an emperor; be welcoming to civilians; and keep in mind “that individual rudenesses are capable of doing irreparable harm.” Lafayette’s style had a natural, uncontrived charm.