STANISŁAW AUGUST I JEGO RYCERSKA SZKOŁA
STANISŁAW AUGUST AND HIS SCHOOL OF CHIVALRY

Summary/Abstract: The School of Chivalry is one of the most significant modernisation projects carried out in the mid-1760s by Stanisław August and his collaborators shortly after he ascended to the Polish throne. It was an educational project implemented a few years before the establishment of the Commission of National Education, the first educational authority in Poland and in Europe, the function of which corresponded to the present ministry of public, secular education. For the initiative of a modern school to be successful, it needed a well-qualified personnel, including the management staff (a high number of them were foreigners), an appropriately structured educational programme (initially based on Western models), and textbooks. What played a forming role in the case of the Corps of Cadets was an complex ritual supported by the following texts: catechism books, dialogues, forms, which should be treated as mnemotechnical tools, but also as ones building the identity of a graduate from the School, which was intended to be a breeding ground for the military and administrative elite of the state. Its description cannot ignore the moral layer that escaped the educational programmes and the cadets’ everyday life, which was not devoid of duels and embarrassing diseases.

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