An Academy at the Court of the Tsars by Nikolaos Chrissidis

Author:Nikolaos Chrissidis [Chrissidis, Nikolaos]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Education, Modern, 17th Century
ISBN: 9781609091897
Google: dK68DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2016-08-10T01:10:53+00:00

CONCLUSION

Education, Westernization, and Secularization in Early Modern Russia

Reflecting the dominant historiographical view, A. Iu. Andreev recently concluded that there was no continuity (preemvstvennost’) between the Leichoudian period of the Academy and the reorganized Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy after 1701.1 Indeed, following the received wisdom from nineteenth-century scholarship, he saw a new era during which the Academy followed the example of its counterpart in Kiev. It is rather early to pronounce on these issues since the Muscovite Academy’s curriculum in the early eighteenth century has not been systematically analyzed. Much the same can be said regarding a potential comparison of the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy with the Kiev Mohyla Academy. Since the nineteenth century, there have been several scholarly contributions to the study of the Kievan Academy’s educational activities. In particular, prerevolutionary scholars focused on its early history, its significance for the religious and social history of the Ukraine, and also on the formal aspects of its curriculum. Much less attention was paid to the actual content of courses taught, with the exception of the works of some of its most famous representatives, such as Stefan Iavorskii or Feofan Prokopovich. Due in large part to the dearth of sources and, in Soviet times, to the sociopolitical environment, until the 1960s there were very few attempts to actually study the content of its education, and especially the philosophical curriculum in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. More was accomplished in this regard in the Ukraine in the 1960s and 1970s, primarily by historians of philosophy. Such studies have considerably multiplied since the early 1990s, and scholars have also ventured into social histories of the Kiev Mohyla Academy in the eighteenth century and into comparative examinations of the curriculum in other Orthodox colleges of the Ukraine in the same period.2

Knowledge of the formal aspects of the Kievan Academy’s activity (division of classes, teaching and disciplinary methods, employment of dramatic performances and disputations, disciplinary measures, et cetera) comes from nineteenth-century studies, primarily the works of M. Linchevskii and N. Petrov, and more recent scholarship has advanced little beyond them. Linchevskii discussed the Jesuit origins of the formal structure of the Academy’s curriculum and its pedagogical methods, primarily in comparison to other Jesuit schools based in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.3 Noting that Linchevskii was overwhelmingly basing his conclusions on eighteenth-century evidence (which was more abundant for the Kiev Mohyla Academy), Petrov sought to expand upon and correct some of Linchevskii’s apparent anachronisms. Thus, Petrov provided a detailed analysis and comparison of both Jesuit and Piarist schools of contemporary Poland-Lithuania. In his conclusions, he pointed out that the Kievan Academy from its inception was based on the Jesuit model of middle and higher education. Still, Petrov focused primarily on the external characteristics of the Academy (division of classes, administration, disciplinary methods, student body, and so on) and was much less concerned with the actual content of its teaching beyond its main outlines.4 S. O. Sieriakov has reconfirmed Petrov’s conclusions utilizing more recent scholarship on Jesuit schools in Poland-Lithuania.5 Moreover, the library of

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