De La Salle Brothers

The Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools is a Roman Catholic religious teaching order, founded by John Baptiste De La Salle, born in 1651 in Reims, France. De La Salle had the idea of setting up schools where the children of the working class and the poor would learn reading, writing and arithmetic, and would also receive Christian instruction and other training appropriate for forming good Christians. To do this he brought together a group of men to live in commmunity and conduct the Christian Schools. The founding of the order is said to be 1680.