Early Jesuit Visions of Education

Abstract

Founded by Ignacio de Loyola, the Society of Jesus was approved by Pope Paul III in 1540 and suppressed by Pope Clement XIV in 1773. The Jesuits’ vision of education, which was transformative and student centered, thus showing awareness of the rise of individuality, was framed by The Spiritual Exercises (1548), Chapter IV of their Constitutions (1558), and, especially, the Ratio Studiorum (1599). Their conception of education integrated humanism and medieval scholasticism, embraced Aristotelian conceptions, and adopted the theology of Thomas Aquinas. It intersected humanism and confessionalization. A major aim was to prepare a male Catholic leadership for the new order of things; hence, the emphasis was on the creation of colleges and also universities. Funding of their colleges and universities often led to questionable practices such as slavery. Their educational work was framed by a developing geopolitical context of coloniality, and the ministry followed colonization and trade involving the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe, generating powerful networks and embodying a form of globalism with precursory transnational characteristics. The Jesuits often acted as cultural brokers and interlocutors with local cultures. See interactive map. There was an interplay between the Jesuits’ educational work and their research in math and areas of science with the contextual intellectual and political configurations of emerging ideas and discoveries, particularly in the 16th and 17th centuries, and they tried a degree of articulation with new ideas. The 17th century witnessed the dispute of the Jesuits with the Jansenists around human freedom and divine grace, as well as the decline of scholasticism and Aristotelianism, but also a spiritual renewal that opened the Church to the needs of the people, resulting in basic education for poor children as a response to the Reformation, while the 18th century brought a scientific and philosophical movement. Within the patriarchal setting of the Church, there was a realization that women were needed outside the cloister in the educational enterprise. The 18th-century scenario was not easy for the Jesuits, who could not articulate their thinking within new emerging configurations of political and intellectual ideas as they had done in the 16th century. Interaction with location, the historicity of experience, and the Jesuits’ search for knowledge and the role the schools played in the formation of thinkers of modernity give reasons, among others, to decenter the analysis of the Society. See concept map of contexts.