The Jesuit school in the context of the sixteenth century: formation of a new man

Abstract

From the sixteenth century, religious colleges began their attempt to train masters and disciples preconized religious ideology and with a counterreformist logic. The Society of Jesus was one of the Orders that most bet on teaching, arguing that the education of the young could promote a new catholic society. Thus, as an evangelization strategy, the Order has used normative and homogenizing instruments, such as Ratio Studiorum and the modus parisiensis. According to Durkheim (1955), each society constructs a model of ideal man, from the intellectual, the physical and moral point of view. This ideal, at once one and diverse, constitutes the basic part of instruction. This article shows how the jesuit school inculcated civilizing norms according to the theories of Norbert Elias in order to interfere in the society of its time and to shape the ideal character of a new man.