I think I may have had an inborn disposition toward the Ratio Studiorum.
When I was accepted at Jesuit High in New Orleans in 1965, I looked at the school catalog and felt a thrill as I read about the studies that lay ahead of me: Latin, Algebra, Greek, English, religion, and so on, laid out in progressive order, leading me, I presumed, to what adolescents want most: membership in the world of real adulthood.
The world was opened up before me. Soon I was reading the words of Homer in Greek and those of Cicero in Latin! I remember a quote from Michelangelo at the top of one Greek lesson: "Every time I read Homer, I wonder if I am not twenty feet tall." I identified with that.
Though Classical languages were given a special place, my eyes were opened, my heart expanded, my mind deepened by the range of subjects and the whole experience of a Jesuit school. The approach to the curriculum delivered by a faculty that shared a great vision, the whole effort resting on religious foundations, made the experience all the greater. What we were doing had an ultimate value we could feel.
My college experience by contrast was sadly lacking in vision, order, coherence-any hint of this supercharged meaningfulness. It was only years later, after I had entered the Society and was in graduate studies at Emory University, that I came across a 1953 work by Fr. George Ganss, SJ, St. Ignatius' Idea of a Jesuit University. It helped me realize the importance of a Jesuit document that had made all the difference.
The Ratio
I am referring to the Ratio atque Institutio Studiorum of 1599, usually just called the Ratio or the Ratio Studiorum, written to guarantee a standard quality, style, content, and character among the Jesuit schools that started multiplying even during Ignatius's lifetime.
Each new Jesuit school had to have a plan, a ratio, so that teachers, administrators, and students would all have some idea of what they were about and how they were going to achieve their goals. Such a universal governing document saved re-inventing the wheel each time and gave credibility to the operations, since it was based on the experience of teachers "in the trenches," worked out by academic pros, and approved by the superior general.
The Ratio includes practical directives for running the school: examinations must be taken, prizes awarded, and disputations conducted according to publicized norms. Students are to study Alvarez's Latin grammar (the standard in the Society's schools) at a measured pace and advance only after showing mastery.Students have rules to follow, like not coming to school with swords or knives, not defacing furniture, and attending class faithfully and following teachers' study plans diligently. Individual teachers have particular work to do and are not to veer off into another part of the curriculum, thus the directives that humanities teachers should not be carried away with relatively extraneous scholarly material (eruditio), interesting as it may be.
The Ratio clearly venerates certain teaching authorities: after God, Scripture, the Church, and common sense of what is proper, there is Thomas Aquinas for theology, Aristotle for philosophy, and Cicero for rhetoric. Yet teachers are free to be creative within certain bounds because teaching is recognized as an art rather than a technique mastered by following a rule book.
The Ratio gives its primary attention to the duties of administrators, including the provincial (who is to consider himself "obliged to do his utmost" to ensure the success of the work), the rector, the professors, and the beadles (teacher assistants).
But for all this attention to oversight, the Ratio focuses on students. The motivating question is, "What is going to get the students to actively know, with the best use of their time and talents, what they most need to know, and what will guarantee the most academically, ethically, and religiously supportive environment in which they can do this?"
This care for the student exists within a larger vision that the Ratio expresses as the final goal (we might say the mission) of each stage and of education as a whole. The arch-principle is given in its first rule for the provincial: "[O]ne of the leading ministries of the Society is [to teach] our neighbors all the disciplines in keeping with our Institute in such a way that they are thereby aroused to a knowledge and love of our Maker and Redeemer." Much rests on that phrase, "in such a way that."
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Omnes quidem, sed praecipue humaniorum literarum studiosi, latine loquantur. — Rules for Jesuit Students 442 |
Times change
The Ratio made Jesuit education distinctive, stable, and solid. Its success was unparalleled in the history of education. But times changed. The European Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, in short, the passage from early to later modernity meant that the old framework, with its emphasis on Latin and Greek, could no longer hold its dominant position. The prospect of rewriting the Jesuit educational plan for a new day seemed a monumental task, particularly as new sciences sprang up.
For a long time the Ratio lay neglected while everyone tried to adapt to the emerging norms. The day came when people could no longer assume that any one Jesuit had read the document or had a good idea of its achievement. In America, a competing structure separating the high school years from the college ones seemed to put the traditional plan at an even further remove.
And yet the Ratio survived, after a fashion, in academia. Many Jesuit high schools still teach Latin and Greek, and most Jesuits colleges still require language study, philosophy, and theology, the three major stages of Jesuit education in the Ratio.
For a long time these stages also constituted the backbone of Jesuits' training. Until 1965, Jesuit formation retained the structure and much of the contents of the Ratio in its movement from the studies of the juniorate (which focused on letters, the study of language, composition, literature, and public speaking) to philosophy and theology. Even "regency" (magisterium in Latin), the period between philosophy and theology, was integral to this framework, for a Jesuit was to become a magister, a master or teacher of what he had studied.
This is the key point: the Ratio did not just found the schools. By standardizing the formation of its scholastics, it helped found the Society itself and was in some ways as important as the Spiritual Exercises and the Constitutions.
The task of translating
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Fr. Claude Pavur, SJ, a native of New Orleans, focuses on Latin Studies and the history of Western humanism at Saint Louis University. The Institute of Jesuit Sources published his translation of the Ratio in 2005 ($29.95, 314-633-4622 or www.jesuitsources.com). |
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I had, therefore, ample reason to take the Ratio out of the attic and try to see it in its original brilliance that is not so obvious in the often mundane procedural details of early modern classrooms. I was fortunate to be able to begin with a sense of the value of this treasure.
It was a challenge translating the Ratio's Latin. It was often direct and simple enough, coming in bite-sized chunks, very unlike the elegant Ciceronian clauses that seemed such unruly spaghetti to us in high school. The difficulty lay in the concepts, clear to the authors but not necessarily to me. What did they mean by the arts, for example, or disciplines, or seminary? Were these close to what we think of today when we use those terms? What were the distinctions between the words for students: auditores, alumni, convictores, scholastici, studentes, discipuli? Was a doctor different from a professor? And, leaving aside technical concepts such as the subalternation of the sciences, how should one translate a simple word like atrium, which could be the school yard (except that it was surrounded by the building) or simply an atrium (except that it was often uncovered). Courtyard seemed to be the best solution.
Despite the long while it took to see the task to completion, this project has been the one I have enjoyed the most. It had that aura of value and relevance that made every delay and stumble worthwhile. I was working on a document that had helped make the Society what it is and might have the seeds of exactly what education-Jesuit and secular-needs today. At the very least it gives us a model whose effectiveness we would be very fortunate to emulate. 