Bracka School
Bracka School (alternatively spelled as Bratska School or Bratska Shkola; Cyrillic: Брацка школа or, literally, Brotherhood School, Fraternal School or Fellowship School) is a community-based educational initiative originated in the end of XVI century in Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Eastern Europe.
History
Eastern Slavic languages have been the lingua franca in Eastern Europe for centuries. Predecessors of Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian languages dominated in the majority of lands of Great Duchy of Lithuania. Because Great Duchy of Lithuania was formally a part of the greater Polish state called Rzeczpospolita in the middle of the XVI century, its public schools used Polish language, not Eastern Slavic ones.
To reflect this divergence, Polish nobleman of Eastern European descent Konstanty Wasyl Ostrogski opened Ostroh Academy in Ostroh, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1576. This academy is now considered being the first institution of higher education in Ukraine. Without doubts, it influenced the wave of fellowship schools that follows shortly.
Fraternal schools in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania are educational institutions created by church brotherhoods. The fraternal schools of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were closely connected with the fraternal schools of the Russian and Belz voivodeships of Poland (especially the Lviv Assumption fraternal school), the Ostrog Academy, the Kiev-Mohyla Collegium, the fraternal schools of the lands of Ukraine that were torn away from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania according to the Lublin Union.
Education system
At the head of the school was the rector, the teachers (didaskaly) were elected at fraternity meetings. Fraternal schools had 3-5 classes, they were general-class. After receiving the initial training, students began to study the "seven liberal arts". Church Slavonic (his Belarusian (West Russian) izvod), Greek, Latin, Polish, Belarusian (the state language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania) languages, works of ancient thinkers, dialectics, rhetoric, music were studied. Students also received some knowledge of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and geography. The pedagogical system of schools was formed under a certain influence of humanistic and reformational ideas, Jesuit colleges.
In fraternal schools, a class-less system of instruction was used, in which the catechic method of teaching was dominant, built on questions and answers. For didactic purposes, theatrical performances were organized, fraternal schools provided for the organization of the choir and music education.
Many students later became well-known scientists, public figures, teachers. Teachers in fraternal schools were church and public figures, polemic writers S. Zizany and L. Zizany, M. Smotrytsky, L. Karpovich, S. Nosov, S. Polotsky and others. Fraternal schools of the territory of Belarus and Ukraine Main article: Fraternal schools
In the 16th — 17th centuries, Orthodox fraternal schools played an important role in the development of education in the territory of modern Belarus and Ukraine, and had the goal of opposing the Catholic Church.
Fraternal Orthodox schools were opened in Brest (1591), Mogilev (1590–1592), Minsk (1612), Polotsk (1633), Vilna and other cities [1]. see also
