True to the Ratio Studiorum? Jesuit Colleges in St. Petersburg

Abstract

The dramatic success of Jesuit schools since Society admitted first lay, or extern, students to its college in Gandia, Spain, in 1546 is unparalleled in history of education. By time Ignatius of Loyola died in 1556, Society had thirty-one schools, with more than ten times that number, 373, at death of fifth Father General, Claudio Aquaviva, in 1615. During Aquaviva's tenure, in response to educational explosion, a comprehensive set of school regulations, Ratio atque Institutio Studiorum Societatis lesu, was drafted, debated, and finally promulgated in 1599 after fifteen years of preparation. The letter of transmission included Aquaviva's injunction that this plan of studies . . . ought to be observed in future by all of ours, setting aside all other plans.1 But how faithfully was it followed? Was Ratio timeless ped? agogical guide its proponents asserted, the best means for giving mind much desired liberal training and general culture? Or was its result, as Polish intellectual Tadeusz Czacki said in 1804 of Jesuit schools in Belorussia, that the citizens they have educated there are stupider and more immoral than those from our provinces? How true was Charles Eliot of Harvard's claim in 1899 that the curriculum of Jesuit colleges ... has remained almost unchanged for four hundred years, disregarding some trifling concessions made to natural science? A look at two Jesuit schools that flourished in early-nineteenth-century Russia reveals notable deviations from Ratio, particularly in curriculum, but also remarkable continuity in methodology and spirit. St. Petersburg's Pauline College (1801) and Noble Pension (1803) took root in an envi? ronment far removed from sixteenth-century Western European set? ting of Ratio, and although Tsar Alexander I summarily closed schools and expelled Jesuits from capital in December 1815, his action was culmination of a much broader political, cultural, and religious