User:Daniel Hendrickson
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Daniel S. Hendrickson, SJ
[edit] The Ratio Studiorum
[edit] An Official Plan of Jesuit Education
My course of study seeks to understand the cultural and philosophical milieu -- components of classic and Renaissance humanisms, namely, and the paradigmatic shift from scholastic Medieval thought into the Modern era as exemplified by the University of Paris -- which inspired the Ratio Studiorum of the Jesuit Order, the Society of Jesus.
[edit] My Research
The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (1936), by Hastings Rashdall
“[A] speculative impulse was communicated to Abelard, in whose hands scholastic treatment of theology attained its fullest development . . . With Abelard the great scholastic movement reaches a point at which it begins to identify itself with what we may call the university movement . . . Abelard inaugurated the intellectual movement out of which [universities] eventually sprang. The method of inquiry and of teaching of which he was the originator was the method with essentially characterized . . . the whole cycle of medieval studies.” (pg.43)
Origins of the University (1985), by Stephen Ferruolo
“In an indirect and quite unintended way, the reformers’ persistent struggle to keep the monks and regular clerics out of the schools and to keep secular students out of the cloister seems to have contributed to the formation of the university. Not only had monastic opposition . . . provided an additional impetus to the masters’ efforts to reform and to regulate their own affairs, but the exclusion of monks and regular clerics from the schools had also helped the masters develop their own professional consciousness.” (pg. 314)
Ignatius' Idea of a Jesuit University (1956), by George Ganss
“In brief resumé, a Jesuit university in Ignatius’ concept is an organized community of administrators, scholars, teachers, and other competent associates who aim, by cooperative effort, to stimulate each student to the self-activity by which [she or he] will perfect, with well-balanced attention, [her or his] whole personality to the highest virtues of both the intellect and the will, that is, to both wisdom and charity. The truth is taught to stir up good deeds.” (pg. 187)
“The [Renaissance] enthusiasm for antiquity . . . abetted the change in ideals from those of medieval times. Then spiritual values had held the highest place. Service to God, the care of one’s soul, justice and charity towards [all] were universally deemed to be [one’s] chief duties, and the model of life was the saint. In place of these ideals, many humanists, shifting their interests more to [the individual] and . . . worldly concerns, revived and substituted ideals drawn from classical literature. One of these was what they named humanitas. By this term they meant an ensemble of qualities—intellectual force, literary excellence, artistic taste, polished manners, and elegant bearing—all intended to enhance . . . a citizen.” (pg. 137)
“Typical of the modus Parisiensis were the job descriptions for the various offices. Rules and more rules detailed minutely the duties of each of the responsible offices as well as the means to fulfill them. The Jesuits remained faithful to this Parisian tradition taken from medieval times. A sizable part of the first pedagogical documents of the Order were made up of rules for various offices. The most famous of these documents, without a doubt, is the Rules for the Rector of the Roman College (1551). The main body of the Ratio Studiorum (1559) is none other than a collection of thirty series of rules corresponding to distinct offices, counting no less than 467 articles.” (pg. 34)
“The modus Parisiensis was, for Jesuits, a point of departure for the creation of their own pedagogy and educational system. The method systemized by Jerónimo Nadal in 1548 in the prototype school at Messina evolved and became diffused. The modus Parisiensis gradually ceded its place to the modus Collegii Romani. Later this would evolve into the Ratio Studiorum. Under new titles, and in successive editions, the Parisian roots of Jesuit pedagogy are unmistakable. At their origin are those ten Masters in Arts from Paris who studied together ‘according to the method of Paris, where the Society first studied, and so [it] knows the methods there.’” (pg. 49)
"Chapter 6: The Schools" in The First Jesuits (1993), by John W. O'Malley
“The Society [of Jesus] was the first religious order to undertake systematically, as a primary and self-standing ministry, the operation of full-fledged schools for any students, lay or clerical . . . Over the course of the next two centuries, the Society established its remarkable network of more than eight hundred educational institutions . . . a truly unique phenomenon in the history of education that ended with the suppression of the order in 1773.” (pg. 239)
The educational “…program . . . in its totality transcended the designation modus parisiensis. An inversion of terminology began to take place, as the Jesuits now occasionally used modus italicus to indicate the style of their schools in Italy, which they in turned wanted to introduce to Paris. ‘Our way of proceeding’ had developed its educational component.” (pg. 227)
Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (1939), by Werner Jaeger
“…the ever present aim of their life came to be more and more vividly defined. It was the creation of a higher type of man. They believed that education embodied the pursuit of all human effort. It was, they held, the ultimate justification for the existence of both the individual and the community.” (pg. xvii)
“In approaching the problem of education, the Greeks relied wholly on this clear realization of the natural principles governing human life, and the imminent laws by which man exercises his physical and intellectual powers. To use that knowledge as a formative force in education, and by it to shape the living man as the potter moulds clay and the sculptor carves stone into preconceived form—that was a bold creative idea which could have been developed only by that nation of artists and philosopher. The greatest work of art they had to create was Man. They were the first to recognize that education mean deliberately moulding human character in accordance with an ideal.” (pg. xxii)
Early Christianity and Greek Paideia (1965), by Werner Jaeger
“What in Greek formation or morphosis of the human personality now becomes for the Christian the metamorphosis of which Paul had spoken when he wrote to the Romans, asking them to undergo a process of radical metamorphosis through a renewal of their spirit.” (pg. 97)
