Dénes Dienes: History of the Reformed Church Collég in Sárospatak (Sárospatak, 2013)
FLOURISHING AND SCATTERING THE REFORMED COLLEGE IN THE 17TH CENTURY - The educational reform in 1629 and its consequences
32 THE REFORMED CHURCH COLLEGE IN THE 17TH CENTURY redeem this by agreeing to physical blows administered to their behind by a rod. In more severe cases - stealing or debauchery those found guilty were dispatched to prison (career), the school itself having such a facility. Those deemed to be beyond hope (obdurate offenders) were expelled and also given to suffer the humiliation of being denied the right to depart from the College gracefully, the tradition being, that, as a gesture of friendship, those leaving could be accompanied to the town limits by fellow students. THE EDUCATIONAL REFORM IN 1629 AND ITS CONSEQUENCES From the time in 1620 when the revised regulations were introduced, it became clear that György Rákóczi I. took the responsibilities of patronage seriously. He did not limit himself to providing financial support to the school but, with significant incentives, also urged both a transformation in the life of the College and an improvement in the standards of education. In the second half of the 1620s - taking advantage of the lull following the Pozsony (Bratislava) peace agreement of 1626 - he expressed the desire that the pastors and teachers of the College work out a comprehensive academic reform. This reform was introduced in 1629. Taking into account the items in the reform, the draft proposed an expanded curriculum for secondary students previous to starting their studies at the academic level. It prescribed the teaching of rhetorics and logic in greater detail and for longer periods, while the basics of these were to be taught at the lower secondary school level. It furthermore proposed the introduction of physics (as a natural science subject) and the Hebrew language at the secondary school level. The students were reluctant to agree to these proposals and submitted an appeal to the ecclesiastical leadership. The teachers themselves were skeptical about the possibility of introducing all the proposals contained in the draft document. They referred to that very real and factual problem, that the students came from very mixed educational backgrounds and traditions and the majority of them simply had not yet acquired the basics of language needed to be able to understand and apply rhetorics and logic in lower classes. Surely, it is no coincidence that twenty years later Comenius worked on transforming the education system in Patak so that it would standardize the foreign language education program and ensure that a firm foundation is established in the lower classes. But the church council meeting in 1648 showed that the issue of students having various academic levels was a persistent one and needed to be addressed by the Protestant school system. The main obstacle to a comprehensive reform of the local educational system was that the students boys arriving at the College came from different market town schools with different levels of education. This council meeting would make decisions in the spirit of the Reforms of 1629, extending it not only to the College in Patak but to the entire region west of the Tisza River, all in the hope of providing a remedy for the problem. The resistance of the students was not motivated merely by their desire for convenience. They were reluctant to invest greater efforts into the expansion
