The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum of 1599: 400th Anniversary Perspectives

The guiding pedagogical document for Jesuit education worldwide was definitively set out in a 1599 tome entitled Ratio Atque Instituto Studiorum Societatis Jesu, "The Plan and Methodology of Jesuit Education." This plan has been praised by scholars from Francis Bacon in the seventeenth century to Harry Broudy and Paul Shore in our day. Some scholars and educators, upon learning of this tradition for the first time, have called it a "best-kept secret." And so it was timely that, at the dawn of the new millennium, an invitational 400th anniversary celebration of the Ratio Studiorum would be held at Fordham University in October of 1999. The fruit of the scholarly papers presented there make up the substance of this book. In addition, two key documents of the late-twentieth-century renewal of Jesuit education are included in the appendixes of this volume. Both The Characteristics of Jesuit Education (1986) and Ignatian Pedagogy: A Practical Approach (1993) have been out of print in English and are provided here in full.