34. Education and Brotherhoods’ activity: general characteristics

Education and Brotherhoods’ activity: general characteristics. 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

35. Cultural role of Ostrih Academy

Cultural role of Ostrih Academy. (Ostrozka shkola or Ostrozka akademiia). A postsecondary institution founded in Ostrih, Volhynia, ca 1576 by Prince Kostiantyn Vasyl Ostrozky. At a time when Catholicism was making inroads into Western Ukraine, the academy was a bastion of Orthodoxy 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. 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 academy was closely affiliated with the Ostrih Press. 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. The example set by the Ostrih Academy 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