Jezuickie kolegia szlacheckie w Europie Zachodniej. Rekonesans

Abstract

This article presents the establishment and development of
Jesuit colleges for nobility in Western Europe. The activity of these
schools expressed consideration for the elite’s educational
aspirations in the order policy. Private boarding schools, serving
a selected group of young people, in terms of ideology, organization
as well as programme, constituted a certain anomaly in
Jesuit educational system. They were also an expression of the
selective approach to egalitarianism propagated in Konstytucje
Towarzystwa Jezusowego (The Constitutions of the Society of
Jesus) and Ratio studiorum (1599). Responding to the educational
aspirations of the upper classes, Jesuits were reforming
secondary school. Selective implementation of elements of the
programme and methods adopted in knight’s academies did not
shake the foundations of humanistic tradition, but the aim of the
institutions for nobility was essentially different from the one
ascribed to knight’s academies. Jesuits wanted to shape their
students devoted to Church and at the same time strengthen the
order’s influence among clerical and lay elite. The initiative regarding
establishment of schools for elite involved mainly kings,
whose aspiration was that exclusive schools educate competent
people devoted to monarchy. School founders – monarchs and
princes presented their own aspirations and demands to the
order, thus individual colleges had their own flavour in terms of
organization and programme. The author of the article indicates
that despite popular opinion in Polish historiography, Jesuits, and
not Piarists were the first to modify secondary schools and
establish collegia nobilium. Jesuits understood that running such
institutions for aristocrats’ sons (in France also for the sons of
wealthy burgesses) offers an opportunity to take over a certain
strategic function, that is control over education of those who
would assume power in the centralizing state.