The First Jesuits: The Schools 21
and without endowment . . . From neighboring hamlets come some four hundred students, mostly of the humble poor [pauperculi].” 47 Although not social revolutionaries, the Jesuits in theory and practice supported improvement of status through education. 47/ Their decision to adopt the humanist rather than the vernacular curriculum, however, directed their schools toward the classes of society for whom that curriculum had particular appeal.48 Moreover, in 1551 Ignatius decided for the Collegio Romano that boys had to attain the basic skills in reading and writing before they were admitted because he believed the Society did not have the manpower to expend on such instruction; later that year he made the rule general.49 The Constitutions, which were being composed at about the same time, stated more mildly that Jesuits did not “ordinarily” teach those skills.50 Many exceptions therefore continued to be made, but wherever the provision was enforced it tended to exclude from Jesuit schools boys from the lower social classes, who had little opportunity otherwise to learn the skills prerequisite to admission. The Jesuits’ determination to minister to all members of society regardless of rank had to do battle, therefore, with the dynamism intrinsic to the humanist program as such and with the repercussions of not teaching the so-called ABC’s.51 48/ The Jesuits adopted the humanistic program for a number of reasons, but especially because, like their contemporaries, they believed that humanistic studies formed upright character, pietas. Although different in many ways from the Christianitas that the Jesuits wanted to instill by their teaching of catechism, pietas correlated with it in that the truths learned were expected to have an impact on the pupil’s behavior and outlook. In this regard their schools correlated with that earlier inspiration. 49/ When in 1552 Nadal asserted the primacy of pietas in the educational system the Jesuits were undertaking, he spoke for them all—“Omnia vero selecte ita ordinanda, ut in studiis primum locum pietas obtineat.”52 He merely echoed one of the most prevalent sentiments of his day.53 Moreover, the Jesuits took for granted that learning and literacy were goods in and of themselves, and they felt at home in promoting them.