Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)

János Ugrai: „THE PERIOD OF NATIONAL ADVANCEMENT” 1777-1849 - The Particle Schools

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FROM THE ENLIGHTEMENT

TO THE END OF THE WAR

OF INDEPENDENCE

program, having studied dialectics and rhetoric and being at least twenty years old, meant - according to the regulations of the Reformed Church - that one could be a student schoolmaster. In the midst of all this, there did exist inordinately capable and dedicated teachers who were able to ensure that their schools maintained high standards. Even a market town’s secondary school was at times able to could attain pre-academic levels.

Despite the not always favourable circumstances, there was need for a relatively large number of schoolmasters within the given church district. It is furthermore known that certain colleges, such as the College in Sárospatak, were able to extend their catchment areas somewhat beyond the boundaries of their own church district. All students enrolled in the theology program in Sárospatak signed a written agreement to abide by the regulations of the school. In perusing the regulations record book of the College, a time-honoured tradition can be discerned: graduated students worked as teachers in neighbouring villages for a few years before beginning to serve as pastors or before going abroad for further study. Ninety percent of the fifty-two students listed in the records of 1617 went on to be teachers as soon as they left Patak. As the school records show, most of them ended up in schools within the Cistisbiscan district while some went to Munkács, Szatmár, Szatmárnémeti, Beregszász, or Ráckeve - all of these being beyond the district boundaries. As the century progressed, this “wider circle” widened even further towards the east and the west and the names of newer towns and cities began to appear regularly in the records: Kassa (a city not under the jurisdiction of the Cisitibiscan church district), Gyöngyös, Nagyvárad, Nagybánya, Tasnád, Mándok, Kisvárda, Máramarossziget, Léva, Losonc and, exceptionally, even Buda. Patak regularly supplied the rectors for the schools in Szatmár and Munkács but the principal destination for young graduates remained the Cisitibiscan district.

There exists a protocol document dating from the turn of the 18th to the 19th century which contains the commissioning letters of two hundred fourteen primary school teachers to congregations in twenty-one different counties, all copied in by the scrivener of Patak between 1773 and 1826. The greatest number of these were letters for the Cistibiscan church district with its one hundred eleven schools. In the Transdanubian (Dunántúl) district, sixteen parishes expected to receive a rector from Patak; there were twenty-seven Particle schools in Upper-Hungary and the same number in the region surrounding Pest to receive teachers; sixty congregations in the Tiszántúl (west of the Tisza River) district are mentioned by the protocol to receive teachers. (Of the counties mentioned, the one furthest to the west was Zemplén county, furthest to the south was Baranya and furthest to the east was Máramaros county, with one parish each.)

Of particular significance were those Particle schools which had stronger financial ties to the College as they were able to provide sufficient income (‘academia promotio’) for the young teachers to study abroad after having completed their three years of teaching.

It can be observed that, from the second part of the 18th century, there was a striving by certain parishes to establish a permanent teaching position and no longer have new teachers regularly come from Patak every two or three years. This process initially led to the loosening up of the Particle system and later to its