Jesuit Education and Innovations

Paper Summary:

In this article, the writer discusses the views that Jesuit education was part of an evolutionary educational movement in Europe and merely re- used already established educational practices, and the view that Jesuit educational practices were truly innovative and so made the Society appealing, popular, and made young men want to study at their schools. Also other general factors such as the changing nature of the society at the time are looked into along with the general growth of education among both Catholic and Protestant schools during this period and the keen interest among some educational writers of reforming the education system. The writer concludes that the main reason for the success of the Jesuit educational practices is that the Jesuit system of education was the first truly ordered, disciplined and highly organised educational system that the early modern world had come into contact with and that it was designed in such a way as to be responsive to the emerging needs of early modern European societies.

From the Paper:

"Town councils in Europe during the 16th century realised that it was very expensive to run a school if it was run by lay people because such people needed a salary of some substance baring in mind that often these people had families that they needed to support. Members of religious orders did not however have families to support baring in mind that their members were often chaste, especially in the case of the Jesuits whose whole mantra stipulated that once you became of a member of the society you were to give up all family ties and relations that you had and that your new family would be the order itself. This directly appealed to many city councils in Europe and resulted in the popularity of Jesuit schools as a whole.
"To answer the question of whether the Jesuit educational system's success was a result of innovation or was a result of the re-use of already established educational practices, one must look at the Ratio Studiorum, which was the Jesuits educational handbook."

Sample of Sources Used:

• John Patrick Donnelly, "The Jesuit College at Padua: Growth, Suppression, Attempts at Restoration
• Paul Grendler, "Schools, Seminaries and Catechetical Instruction", cited in Catholicism in Early Modern History; A Guide to Research, ed. John O' Malley, St. Louis Center for Reformation Research, (1988), pp315-330
• Christopher Carlsmith, "Struggling towards success? Jesuit colleges in Italy, 1540-1600", History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 2, (Summer 2002), p221, p222
• Polanco's "Chronicon I", p370, cited by Farrell in "The Jesuit Code of Liberal Education: Development and Scope of the Ratio Studiorum", Milwakee, (1938), p39
• Juan Polanco, "Monumentia Paedagogica I", pp425-426, trans. by O'Malley, cited in, "The First Jesuits", Massachusetts, (1993), p216

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