Historical story

The stupidest things that were taught in a Polish school in the times of the alleged enlightenment

All-embracing devotion and religious fanaticism. Ridiculous poems. Clinging to outdated theories and ... the physics of greasiness. Did the students in "enlightenment" schools learn anything of value at all?

The 18th century was a period of deep political, economic and social collapse in the history of the Republic of Poland, but also in education. The wars have ruined and devastated the country. The nobility, having achieved a dominant position, showed no desire to educate themselves beyond what was adopted. The emaciated cities were unable to create any centers of the mind movement.

No wonder that a deep crisis also engulfed Polish education. For 18th-century Poles, education simply ceased to be a value.

School governance with the stick

The once outstanding Jesuit school system in the 18th century froze and slipped into apathy. In the curricula of the schools, the classics were lowered and Greek was removed. Governance was introduced with the stick to maintain discipline, but that did not help much. The students caused fights constantly, did not listen and disregarded the teachers . As a matter of fact, the importance of the teacher diminished throughout society, and teaching began to be regarded as a painful and thankless duty.

In the 18th century, Jesuit education in Poland experienced a huge crisis. The illustration of the college of this order in Lviv, established in 1749.

With wrenches on their paws

Physical punishment was the order of the day in the schools of the Enlightenment. Such methods used by professor Sebastian Jan Kanty Czochron are literally described by Piotr Śliwiński in his latest book "Ryngraf" :

Czochron was known for somewhat strange, albeit the least disruptive, punishments served to unruly students. Instead of putting them against the wall, punishing them by kneeling with their backs to the class, throwing a reed on the butt or embarrassing a blackboard with the description of the offense hanging on his chest, he preferred a more effective and immediate solution.

Namely, he called the culprit in the middle of the class, made him hold his open hand out in front of him, and then reached for the enormous bunch of keys he was always tucked in his belt, and poured with gusto on his paws . The lowest "measure" of punishment was one blow, after which the student had the impression that his entire arm would fall off in a moment. For major offenses one got at least five "hands", as the professor called the punishment.

Devotion, fanaticism and stupid poems

And what values, one may ask, did the 18th-century school try to instill in students? The curricula of that time can cause a lot of surprise. In the field of morality, people were confined to superficial matters:they were encouraged to devote themselves and they were taught virtue, but mainly its external signs . People were also persuaded to show respect and flatter the mighty.

It was no better with the content of the teaching itself. The most important thing, of course, was learning religion. As priest Jędrzej Kitowicz wrote:

The catechism, or teaching of religion, was first before all the rest. School penalties for those who did not want to learn or because of the frolics they committed were:refusing to eat dinner, kneeling or plagues.

The teaching of the remaining subjects was low. It was based mainly on cramming Latin, and in addition in a mechanical and not deepened way. The readings were not for valuable knowledge, but for maxims, phrases useful in the discussion and trivial curiosities. In turn, with the help of appropriately selected poetry, students were instilled in a mixture of mythology and Catholic piety . They were also taught to compose poems, but the focus was on perfecting a complicated, sometimes even "acrobatic" form, and not on deepening their content. Here is one of such poems, written by priest Józef Baka from the 18th century:

They will cry once, jump a hundred times,
That the dead body of the cottage is already there
He does not see, because he disgusts,
"Won the shit out of the room! ",
The whole flap, go to the executioner!
Old mushrooms, even fish
They devoured, rubbed.
Clam-shell, not scales!

18th-century school in a period engraving.

The effects of such education were also visible in the sphere of politics. It is easy to see that the school taught young people all the negative behaviors of the nobility, which in the 18th century became a curse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Citizens left it convinced of the uniqueness of their state and attached to the corrupt state system. There were also religious fanatics among them.

Latin above all

Focusing on Latin made noble graduates of 18th-century schools fanatics of the language. Latin has become a habit of the nobility, as one historian has stated. In fact, having no deeper understanding of classical culture, they showed off their knowledge of Latin in the form of sentences and quotations, and the Polish language was stuffed with numerous Latin interjections.

16th-century school on miniature by Hans Holbein.

Such "eloquence" flourished at sejmiks, in tribunals and in all public and private life, at feasts, weddings, baptisms and funerals. Without the Latin jargon instilled in school, the nobleman had no chance of making it his way in life. It was commonly believed that Latin was our second national language, and the Latin school, with all its faults, was the most useful institution for the nation. As Professor Stanisław Kot wrote:

The purpose for which they prepared their lower years of college was to learn rhetoric, empty, boisterous and bloated, saturated with flattery and panegirism; Polish language, allowed to compose speeches, letters and compliments, was polluted with macaronism, that is, it is an admixture of entire Latin phrases in the Polish text.

The physics of greasy

In those few institutions where nature and physics were taught (the Jesuits avoided the natural sciences), the findings made in antiquity by Aristotle were adhered to. This was the case in the first Polish scientific book in the field of physics, with the baroque title "Mathematical information of a reasonably interesting Pole, the whole world, Heaven's earth, y what iest, in difficult matters and practice, making it easier" by Father Wojciech Bystrzonowski. You could read in it that the world consists of four elements:fire, air, water and earth. So just as the ancients thought.

Any attempt to introduce new physics was met with violent attacks by supporters of the Aristotelian view of the world. The language of description was also very traditional. This can be seen, for example, in the textbook by Father Józef Herman Osiński, entitled "Physics confirmed by experiments". In it you could read about this application of the thermometer:

The reason for the thermometer shows how much heat is needed to dissolve different greases, from here we will know which is digestible and which less digestible. According to the Fahrenheit thermometer, the fatness dissolves in this order:Lark from 52 graduses, Krolik, Goose swoyskiey, Kapon, Głuszcza from 69 grad., Lard from 108 grad. […] It will show that the healthiest Larks, then Kroliki, Homemade geese, Głuszcze, Kapłonki, while the meat of pigs and lard is nay indigestible. Because to melt the bacon you need more heat than human heat.

Pseudoscientific crap

Another revelation taught in 18th-century schools was the calculations made by James Ussher, Anglican Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of Ireland. He calculated the age of the Earth based on the Bible. These calculations showed that the creation of the world took place on the evening of October 22, 4004 BC . However, the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise took place on November 10 of the same year. Ussher was recognized as an outstanding scholar and his findings were added to numerous editions of the Bible.

Portrait of James Ussher, whose calculations were taught in eighteenth-century schools. A work by Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen.

On the national level, the source of extraordinary nonsense considered as scientific claims was the first Polish universal encyclopedia by Father Benedykt Chmielowski entitled "New Athens". It contained a collection of information in theology, history, geography, politics, mathematics, zoology, botany, mineralogy, and more. In addition to the credible and scientifically based "New Athens" there was a wealth of misleading and fantastic information.

For example, the author described the geography of the rivers of hell:Acheron, Styx and Lethe. It also presents the assumptions of astrology. He was wondering if a pillar of salt could be found into which Lot's biblical wife had turned whether there was a phoenix bird, unicorn and mermaids, and whether a salamander breathes fire. He also gave various useful practical advice, such as an effective toothache remedy:

Take the bone out of the frog's thigh, this bone of the teeth will touch each other, it will stop hurting. Swallow's eye you put in whose bedding, you will take away his sleep ... a good way to sleepyheads. How to hail reverse? Show a large mirror to the hail cloud and place it against it - where else will it turn .

"Nowe Athens", the first Polish encyclopedia, and its creator Benedykt Joachim Chmielowski.

Let us add that in Polish 18th-century schools there was a geocentric theory for a long time, according to which the Earth was the center of the Universe. Only around 1749 did the Piarists dare to print fragments of Copernicus's findings in one of their calendars according to which the sun was in the center and the earth revolved around it. This sparked outrage from the Jesuits, who staunchly opposed such innovative statements.

Only the reforms introduced by the visionary Stanisław Konarski will bring a change for the better in the 18th-century Polish school. Thanks to him, not without difficulties, a new way of teaching will be propagated in Piarist schools.