EDUCATION AND THE CULTURAL HERITAGE 169and fortune to the Fatherland. It may be that Providence, which has sent us so much bit-
terness, will not allow us to enjoy the happy fruits of our labour in our own lifetime. It
may well be that the Fatherland will not reap the benefits until our gravestones have been
sealed long since. Yet if the Fatherland will be in the future what it is today, if our descen-
dants will be its sons, if they will be Poles, then that is enough to arouse our efforts to
ensure their good... Let us not say that 'God has abandoned us for ever'. Rather let us
say that God is punishing us and tormenting us so that we may enjoy better times...^5
Special attention was paid to the universities. At first the Commission
adopted a hostile position towards the professional cadres of Cracow and
Wilno who merely 'wrap young men's heads in Latin, as with cabbage leaves'.
But in face of the King's reforming zeal the hostility soon waned. In 1776, Hugo
Kottataj (1750-1812), a young canon of the cathedral in Cracow, presented a
memorandum 'On the introduction of sound studies into the Cracow
Academy'. The next year, he was appointed Rector. In 1780, the Commission
reorganized and secularized both the Jagiellonian University and the Wilno
Academy. Each university was composed of two colleges, the Collegium
Fizicum and the Collegium Moralium, each of which in turn contained three
schools - of Mathematics, Physics, and Medicine, and of Theology, Law, and
Letters. At different times during the Partitions, each of these two reformed uni-
versities was to carry the torch of Polish culture alone amidst the tidal waves of
state-sponsored Russian and German enterprises.^6
The spirit of the National Education Commission lingered on long after its
members had been dispersed. For several decades, the partitioning powers paid
little attention to the schools in their Polish provinces. The Tsarist government
was particularly lethargic. In Lithuania, Byelorrussia, and Ukraine, Polish
schools founded before the Partitions continued to function. At Krzemieniec in
Volhynia, the Polish Liceum founded in 1805, offered courses' at university
level. In the Wilno School District administered by A. J. Czartoryski, the
University of Wilno was served by seventy Polish secondary schools and over a
thousand elementary ones. In the Duchy of Warsaw, and the Congress
Kingdom, the development of Polish schools went forward without serious
interruption. The Duchy's Board of Education made provision for universal
primary education. By 1820, 1,222 elementary schools and 35 secondary
schools, organized by Departements (from 1819 by Wojewodztwa) served the
newly founded University of Warsaw (1816) together with a wide range of tech-
nical and professional colleges. At this time, Polish education was far in advance
of anything in central Russia.^7 In Prussia, in contrast, the state educational sys-
tem was orientated towards German culture from the start; and, except in the
Grand Duchy of Posen between 1815 and 1831 attempt was made to support
separate Polish schools. There was never any Polish university in Prussia.
Students seeking higher education automatically required a knowledge of
German, and were obliged to study at a university in Germany. In Galicia, edu-
cation, remained firmly in the hands of the Church. The Piarist and Bazilian
Orders were particularly active. With the exception of the first three grades of