EDUCATION AND THE CULTURAL HERITAGE 167Unlike most of its counterparts in Eastern Europe, the Polish language was a
fully competent all-purpose cultural instrument long before the Partitions.
Unlike Czech or Slovak or Ukrainian, for example, whose vocabulary and
syntax had to be fashioned by nineteenth-century grammarians, or Magyar,
which could be used for some purposes but not for others, Polish possessed a
rich literature, and was currently employed by all classes of society and in all the
branches of the arts, sciences, and government. Its development had progressed
further than Russian, and did not lag behind German. Until the growth of mod-
ern technology in the late nineteenth century, it must certainly be classed as one
of the major European languages. An important landmark was reached in
1807-14 with the publication of the first large-scale Polish dictionary. The lexi-
cographer, Samuel Bogumil Linde (1771-1847), the son of a polonized Swedish
family from Thorn, had worked as a young man in the Zaluski Library. His
Stownik jgzyka polskiego has aided everyone who has ever studied the Polish
language.^2
Education raised its head as an issue of public policy in the last decades of the
old Republic, and occupied a prominent place in the minds of the political
reformers of the Enlightenment. Earlier, in the seventeenth century, the
Republic had possessed a network of 1,500 schools, fired by the healthy compet-
ition of the Catholic hierarchy and the Protestant sects. The older foundations,
from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow to the Lubrariski Academy (1517) in
Poznan or the German Academic Gymnazium in Danzig (1550), were comple-
mented by numerous, distinguished dissenting academies — the Calvinists in
Nieswiez, for example, and in most of the towns of Lithuania, the Czech
Brethren in Leszno, the Arians in Piriczow and Rakow, the Lutherans through-
out Royal Prussia - and by the colleges of the Jesuit and Piarist Orders. By 1750,
however, this network had fallen into decay. The old foundations were mori-
bund. Most of the Protestant academies had closed their doors. Both the Jesuits
and the Piarists had fallen into a mindless routine, mechanically instructing their
pupils in meaningless, grammatical formalities. A key role in the revival of edu-
cation was played by the Revd Stanislaw Konarski (1700-73), sometime
Provincial of the Piarist Order, who united many strands of the Enlightenment
in his broad span of interests. As editor of the series of Volumina Legum
(1732-9), he made a major contribution to legal and constitutional studies; as
author of O skutecznym rad sposobie (On effective government, 1763), to the
political debate; and as a disciple of the French physiocrats, to the promotion of
economic enterprises. In 1740, he founded the Collegium Nobilium in Warsaw,
f or the improvement of young noblemen, and in the 1750s revised the entire cur-
riculum and educational philosophy of his Order. His lifetime was spent in
patient preparation for changes which he never saw. In 1773, the year of his
death, the expulsion of the Jesuits, and the creation of the National Education
Commission opened up educational vistas of a completely new sort.^3
The National Education Commission, sometimes called 'Europe's First
Ministry of Education', was created by order of the Sejm on 14 October 1773