Nagy Júlia –– KedvesCsaba

Teachers and Schools in the 17-18^th CenturyHungarianSchool Literature*

Introduction

      There are two usual ways to study the image of teachers in the Hungarian history of education:

·        collecting records from textbooks and other documents of education;

·        collecting records from popular literature, diaries, memoirs, etc.

These works give special image about schooling, because textbooks show only a schematic picture about this theme; memoirs, diaries are not objective enough and usually do not give too much records; popular literature does not have exact knowledge of schools, people saw only vagabonds with magic power or Faust-like professors. The poems and dramas we call college or school literature were born in schools and we can see the 17-18^th century Hungarian schooling, school life, teacher-student relationship with the eyes of the students and teachers.

      Most of these poems and dramas have not been published yet and it is an unknown part of the history of education, but a possibility for new research. Countless poems, dialogues and dramas were born in Protestant schools in the Old Hungary, and a lot were written in Catholic ones, too. We have collected many poems from different schools and have examined them together with published and unpublished texts and databases of Hungarian school dramas.

Our work is a new part of a research group’s study, which was founded in 1980. Scholars of different disciplines have collected and published all of the old school dramas of Hungary, Transylvania, and the northern and southern region of old Hungary. At the end of the 80s Géza Staud edited the data of Jesuit school dramas in four volumes,[1] Imre Varga edited the data base of Protestant school dramas.[2] In 1992 István Kilián, Márta Zsuzsanna Pintér and Imre Varga collected the Franciscan (Observant), Pauline and Minorite (Conventual) school dramas and records of Catholic Seminary performances and István Kilián edited the bibliography of Piarist dramas in 1994.[3] A lot of drama texts have been published in the last twenty years too, enabling us to study the whole drama tradition of this region and the educational background of these dramas, but this is the first occasion, where we examine these dramas with other genres as one corpus. We have taken part in the work of this research group since 1995, I have studied Protestant school literature from this aspect, Csaba Kedves studied the Catholic poems and dramas. In our paper we show the genres of school literature in Hungary with a special regard to their role in education and society. We compare the image of teachers using Schola Ludus by Comenius as the basis of research in Protestant schools, and Catholic school dramas as the basis of Catholic studies.

      It is an interesting process, how the teachers’ image was changed during the 17-18^th century, and it’s even more interesting, how the audience saw the teachers portrayed by school literature. Sometimes teachers wrote the exam-poem as an apologia for their attacks, sometimes a funeral poem lists the relatives of the dead student, etc. In our paper we present some examples of teachers and schools through the eyes of the audience and society, i.e. as college literature shows them.

The image of schools and teachers in the Protestant school literature (Nagy Júlia)

      The first important Protestant work about school life was the fourth part of Schola Ludus by Comenius.[4] It is a school drama collection, which was written for the Sárospatak College students in 1654. King Ptolemaeus decides to study the intellectuals. In the first scenes he receives ‘white collar workers’. After the scenes of a notary, a cartographer, a printer, a bookseller, a librarian, a judge and a copyist, the next intellectual is a schoolmaster, who speaks about the educational system and his dream about education. He demonstrates different classes to the king. They go to the first class, where Litterator togatus teaches pupils to read and write. In the next class pupils are taught to sing and read music, and then the king is shown the grammar class. At the end of this part the schoolmaster displays classes of Janua, Vestibulum and Atrium, and in the Act 4 scene 3 Praeceptor Janualis teaches Latin syntax to his students. Comenius’s aim was to show real life, so he did not give an assessment about school life, only gave an image. In this drama-collection the teacher is a very honest and strict figure, but one, who likes students very much. He is a didactic person, but we do not know anything about his moral life.

      From the second part of the 17^th century I did not find any school literature about school life. School performances were banned in most Calvinist schools during the 17^th century. Seeing the Catholic Passion Plays and other performances Calvinist Church announced such performances immoral, so Calvinist college literature could flourish only around and after the mid 18^th century. In Unitarian and Lutheran schools some dramas and poems were written in this period, but the themes were from the Bible or the curriculum. The first part of the 18^th century saw the birth of college literature proper, this was the time when several special genres developed, e.g. exam and funeral poems, poems for St Gregory’s name day or invitations to play. New themes appeared in school dramas, too, because the objective was changed: authors wanted to entertain and show the most important human values to the audience.

      Playwrights used the same method in the 18^th century like Comenius, but it was more playful: classes, school lessons were not represented on stage any more. How could they show school life then and what was the aim of these dramas? The aim was to convey the values of education to the audience, because the problem was that parents did not want to allow their children to go to school in summer. There are a lot of examples, now we demonstrate this type only with A Play for the Becoming Students.[5] A mother is waiting for her son, who studies at school. When the son and his father arrive home, they have dinner, and the student studies through the night. Next morning the student gets up at five o’clock and goes to school. It is a simple story, but in every scene the Muses praise the student for his diligence, so this boy becomes the model for every student.

     Probably The Exile of Naso is the only Protestant drama from the 18^th century, where teachers showed the school inside, but the image was very special.[6] Ovid was convicted from Rome, so he went to the school of Losonc. The students were very happy to see him and they invited him to drink some wine for this occasion, and when he could go back to Rome, the students said good-bye to him – here we can see only the joyful side of the school life.

      Both Comenius and 18^th century authors directed dramas about the students’ future, too. In the third part of Schola Ludus King Ptolemaeus decides to study the trades. Every master comes to the stage, shows his tools to the king (and to the audience), speaks about his work and then steps off. Following Comenius’s footsteps Calvinist teachers wrote certamens of trades, too,[7] but their aim was persuade parents to allow their sons to school, so in these works they disparaged other jobs.

      Probably the poems written in schools give a more objective image about schooling, than these dramas. There are a lot of poems for St Gregory’s name day, the 12^nd of March. It was the time when new students went to school. Older students went from house to house in villages and told poems or performed small dramas about schooling. These works show us the worth of learning - but we do not have a real image about schooling, because their aim was to invite to school, so these did not portray the negative parts of schooling.

            We get a more objective image about schooling from the poems about the rules of school life. These works thought the formal rules of behaviour in small articles. E. g. we know from them that pupils must have washed their hands and face after they got up, they had to braid their hair, they had to greet their teachers and go to church. They had not sleep, talk or spit in church, etc.[8]

      Among the 18^th century manuscripts there are a lot of funeral poems written by teachers or students. These were written for the burial of teachers and students, and the author knew the dead from the school. In some poems we can read about the rules of the school, because there were students who did not keep the rules and their death were because of it. E.g. swimming in rivers was forbidden in some seasons, but students liked to swim and one of them was drowned. A very nice funeral poem was born for his burial, where Death and the dead boy is talking about the rules of the school: the student must have died because he did not keep them.[9] Another example, where students were not allowed to hunt, but one of them went to the forest. The hunter must have died, because he was a bad student.[10]

We can see a lot of things about students’ life, too. In one of the poems, which was written for a boy who died because of an illness, we can see the other students listening to the agony of the sick pupil all the night, but they could not help him. It is a very harrowing scene when in the morning they went to him and found him dead. But we can see examples about teacher-student relationship, too. In 1774 a small boy arrived in Sárospatak College to start his studies there, but his time was too short, because some days later he got ill and died. In the funeral poem we can see his teacher, who could not fall asleep because he liked his student very much and who was with the small boy during his agony and last minutes.

There were poems about teachers, too. Usually students did not write about schooling or pedagogical methods in them, we can see only the person. When Sámuel Szathmári Paksi died in 1774 in Sárospatak (he was only 25 years old then!), a lot of funeral poems were written for his burial. Some of them show only his erudition, but we can find proof that students liked him very much as a person, too. They praised him as an author of very good school poems in order to teach the kids for writing poems, and also as a playwright whose dramas contained the students’ homework poems, too. And they praised him as a student and a teacher. In one of the funeral poems the writer said:

„Et coelo meliore sui cum parte receptus,

            Nunc pandet melius discere quam doceret.”[11]

      The most interesting poems are the exam poems written by teachers on the theme of schooling.[12] From these poems we learn about the whole life of the school.[13] The authors studied in colleges for years, after it they got an employment as a teacher in villages and they met real life. And this life was not so beautiful for them; they found a lot of troubles with local parents. The problem was that teachers had only ten - eleven weeks to teach to write and read. A lot of poems were written as apologias, where teachers say sorry because students did not know too much things at the exam. But these poems involved the curriculum, too. We know that “Hübner” was the textbook,[14] translated to Hungarian from a German exegesis for pupils, and they used the small catechism, too. There was a problem that parents did not want to spend money for textbooks, so the teacher must have taught without them. These works portrayed a very disapproving image about the life of 18^th century Hungarian primary school teachers. On the other hand every poem wants to show the beauty of knowledge, too, e.g. in a lot of works we can read that other jobs can be nice, but the teacher’s job is the most beautiful. So we can see men, clever and intelligent, who wants to live a moral life, but there is nobody around him who can appreciate this. There is a very upsetting poem from the end of the 17^th century about teachers’ life. First we can see the teacher-to-be in the school, who is anxious to know everything, then the poem shows the teacher walking on the street, but people do not greet him. It is so sad – recites the poem – if the teacher does something wrong everybody attacks him, but if he teaches as good as he can, nobody praises his work. One example of the poem is the doctor, who sometimes gives wrong medicine for the sick who can die because of it, but – the poem says – the teacher never gives bad “medicine” for the soul!

      There was time for enjoyment, too. We saw in The Exile of Naso, that older students had time for joy, when they could drink. But smaller students had time for relaxe, too, when they went to play ball games. There are poems where authors made a contrast between school life and playing. We can read about dark, dirty schools and stinking classrooms, so we can see another part of 18^th century schooling from these poems.[15]

      You can see that the 17-18^th century Hungarian Protestant school literature give a special, but real image about schooling, which is quite objective, and there is a very important value of them: the authors really knew school life.

Teachers, schools in Catholic college-literature (Kedves Csaba)

      If we study Hungarian Catholic college-literature, we must say that the themes and genres are not so varied as Protestant school literature. There were poems for St Gregory’s name day, too, which are quite close to folk literature, but not too many other poems were written. All the more interesting is the school drama, because this is the genre, which was as popular in Catholic schools as funeral or exam poems at Protestant schools. These were of several types and we can see examples for these forms in every Catholic school, so the themes did not depend on religious orders very much (which does not mean that there were not special forms of the different orders), so we can examine the texts as one corpus.

      The image of teachers in dramas is quite interesting. From the Transylvanian Csíksomlyó, where was an observant Franciscan monastery, there are two interludes in a drama on Mary’s Ascension.[16] In the first interlude a teacher wants to have some students, but the only applicant is a gipsy, who does not want to study Latin grammar and the alphabet, so the teacher starts beating him up. His next student is a peasant boy, who comes with his father, but the boy is quite silly, so the teacher beats him up like the gipsy.[17] (What a difference: in a Calvinist drama a clever peasant boy studies in the College, his father wants to carry him home to work at the farm, but the boy says no to his dad.[18])

      In Kézdivásárhely- Kanta was a minorite cloister and school, where was a lot of drama performed. In on of the comedies Stolander, the rich but stupid peasant wants to go to a ball.[19] He got an invitation from Prince Non habeo, but he realizes that he does not speak Latin and he does not know the etiquette, so hires teachers. But he is too stupid to realize that he is a victim of four vagabonds and he did not study anything from them. We know such conclusion from Protestant school literature, too, but in this drama it is not so bitter: knowledge gives power, the destiny of the stupid is abuse and suffering.

      We saw that there were Protestant exam poems, where the author praised teachers’ profession. In Parentum nimius amor, which was acted in Kanta in 1738,[20] the Magister tells the same words as Protestant teachers: every profession can be nice, but non of them is happier trade that of the teachers’, and he says good-bye to his students as a father can say good-bye to his son. We can see such image of the teacher in the Csíksomlyó Passion Play from 1742, too.[21] In this drama the teacher’s most important student is Androphilus, the allegory of Adam. He teaches the moral life to his students. In these works the image of teachers is complex: he teaches Latin grammar, reading and writing, and he is the man, who sets a good example with his moral life.

      The students’ image is as complex as the teachers’. We have a tragedy from Csíksomlyó, where Edmundus, the student leads a sinful life.[22] His punishment is the same as Androphilus’s in the Csíksomlyó passion play: he has to die![23]

      The most favourite image of students is the vagabond. His figure is shown in many Catholic dramas, like the famous interlude Mrs Borka and vagabond György written by Kertso Cyrják in Kanta,[24] too, where a spinster wants to engage the student, but we can find similar figures in Stolander in the ball and Kintses Naso gives a ball, too, where Naso Kincses is the victim of Ventifak (it means: who makes the wind).[25]

      Erasmus Montanus (a Jesuit drama translated from the German translation of the Danish Holberg’s work), is about a student, who comes back from abroad, where he studied, but when he arrives home, he must realize that life at home is not like he used to dream at the universities, e.g. his father–in-low did not want to allow his wedding with his fiancée if he did not say that the earth did not move. In this case the student is a quite bumptious fellow with his Latin words, which does not make him too nice for the audience of the drama.[26]

      Catholic school literature gives a schematic picture about teachers and students. The school, as a building or a place for learning is not shown in these dramas. Probably some drama from Csíksomlyó can give some aspect in this theme, but most scenes are in gardens and roads in these dramas, too. In Nagyszombat there was a Jesuit performance in 1717, the Didascalus cum Discipulis „Elementaris exhibuit Daidascalum cum discipulis.” which – as the title shows - probably could give some useful data for this theme, but this text was lost, we know only the record about this performance and we know some records from Székesfehérvár, too, but these texts were lost, too.[27]

      Catholic school literature could not give an objective picture about schooling, like Protestant one did, because the aim was not to show the values of teaching and learning, but it was to convey, to teach morality. That is why we get schematic image about teachers and students from these products. We do not know too much things about the curriculum either, we do not learn anything about the real life of a teacher or a student, but we know a lot of things about the teachers’ and audience’s opinion on schooling, if these show vagabonds and teachers, who sometimes beats their students, sometimes teaches morality.

      You can see, school dramas and other works of school literature are unexplored and rich sources of educational research. We hope, our and our departments’ studies and our paper could give some useful data for this field.

© Nagy Júlia, Kedves Csaba, 2002