Support of education was in charge of brotherhoods.

Schools were founded to counteract influence of Jesuits and to preserve Orthodoxy. The Lviv Dormition Brotherhood School served as a model for other brotherhood schools of the Commonwealth Brotherhood schools. Schools founded by religious brotherhoods for the purposes of counteracting the denationalizing influence of Catholic (Jesuit) and Protestant schools and of preserving the Orthodox faith began to appear in the 1580s. The first school was established in 1586 by the Lviv Dormition Brotherhood. The school served as a model for other brotherhood schools in various towns of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, most of them in Ukraine and Belarus. In the first half of the 17th century even some villages had brotherhood schools. The most prominent schools were the Lviv Dormition Brotherhood School and Kyiv Epiphany Brotherhood School.

At first the brotherhood schools had a Greek-Church Slavonic curriculum: lectures were in Church Slavonic, and Greek was taught as a second language. (Hence these schools were also called Greek schools.) Then the schools began to adopt the structure and curriculum of the Jesuit schools, using Latin as the primary language, particularly those schools that modeled themselves on the Kyivan Mohyla Academy. Ukrainian was used only for examination purposes and, from 1645, for teaching the catechism. The curriculum of most of the brotherhood schools provided what was accepted as a secondary education in those times: classical languages, dialectics, rhetoric, poetics, homiletics, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (church singing). Some schools taught Orthodox theology and Catholic theology (for the purpose of polemics). Brotherhood schools were open to various social strata. Students were judged not by lineage, but by achievement (in contrast to Jesuit schools). Discipline in the schools was strict, and physical punishment was used. Orphans and poor students lived in bursas and student residences. Lecturers were required to set an example by their behavior and to have pedagogical training. Brotherhood schools made a significant contribution to the growth of religious and national consciousness and the development of Ukrainian culture. They published textbooks, particularly language textbooks. The Czech educator J.A. Comenius (Komenský) derived many of the ideas in his Didactica Magna (1628–32) from the practices of the brotherhood schools.

The Ostroh Academy, founded approximately in 1576, was the first postsecondary learning center of Orthodoxy and Ruthenian culture. Founded ca 1576 in Ostrih, Volhynia, by a Ukrainian nobleman Prince Kostiantyn Vasyl Ostrozky--one of the most remarkable figures in the 16th-century Ukrainian cultural and national rebirth--the Ostih Academy was the first postsecondary learning center in the Orthodox Eastern Europe. At a time when Catholicism was making inroads into Western Ukraine, the academy was a bastion of Orthodoxy and Ruthenian culture and maintained the traditional orientation toward Constantinople. Though the Ostrih Academy did not develop into a Western European-style university, as Ostrozky had hoped, it was the foremost Orthodox academy of its time. Closely associated with the Ostrih Press, the academy and the Ostrih intellectual circle had an enduring influence on pedagogical thought and the organization of schools in Ukraine and provided a model for the brotherhood schools that were later founded in Lviv, Lutsk, Volodymyr-Volynskyi, Vilnius, and Brest.

The curriculum consisted of Church Slavonic, Greek, Latin, theology, philosophy, medicine, natural science, and the classical free studies (mathematics, astronomy, grammar, rhetoric, and logic). In addition the academy was renowned for choral singing, and developed the ostrozkyi napiv.

The first rector of the academy was the writer Herasym Smotrytsky. The instructors, many of whom had been invited from Constantinople, included the pseudonymous Ostrozkyi Kliryk, the Greek Cyril Lucaris, J. Latos (a philosopher and mathematician from Cracow University), and Yov Boretsky, who later became rector of the Lviv Dormition Brotherhood School and then metropolitan of Kyiv. Hetman Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, the writer and scholar Meletii Smotrytsky, and several other prominent political and cultural leaders studied at the academy. With the founding of a rival Jesuit college in Ostrih in 1624, the academy went into decline, and by 1636 it had ceased to exist.

Brotherhood educational agency made significant contribution to the growth of religious and national consciousness, and exerted profound influence on Ukrainian culture.

Practical Class 5

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 1034