The Discussions on the Educational Model of the Orthodox Academy of the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

The historiography of the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium (Academy), Moscow Slavic Greek Latin Academy, and the Chernihiv, Kharkiv, and Pereiaslav Collegiums comprise hundreds of works where many valuable ideas and observations have been accumulated. At the same time, a number of diverging judgments coexist in literature regarding certain key characteristics of these educational institutions, such as estate-based vs. socially inclusive (soslovnyi or vsesoslovnyi) or progressive vs. archaic. Some of these interpretations date back to the nineteenth century and are still treated as axioms today. The purpose of this article is to discover the main enduring historiographical stereotypes that influence how the nature of the Orthodox academies (collegiums) in the Eighteenth-Century Russian Empire is understood and to offer an explanation for them. By pinpointing differences in the interpretation of the characteristic features of the academy (collegium) model such stereotypes are identified. The common post-Soviet approach to the analysis of historiography, which involves segregating periods of study and grouping works by the topic or level of generalization, means that historiographical overviews rarely touch on the issue of the essential traits of an educational model. Evaluations of these institutions in terms of semantic-structural and semantic-axiological dichotomies, such as East-West, indigenous-alien, or progressive-archaic, I view as obsolete. Overcoming rigid linear oppositions and reorienting research towards interpenetration as opposed to unyielding polarity will help us better to understand the peculiarities of the phenomenon of the Orthodox academy (collegium) and to compare its features to the basic features of the analogous Western European educational institutions, such as the Jesuit collegium or pre-classical university.