Occupation Poet, dramatist Role Writer | Name Stanislaw Konarski Organizations founded Collegium Nobilium | |
 | ||
Born 30 September 1700 ( 1700-09-30 ) Zarczyce Duze, Poland Died August 3, 1773, Warsaw, Poland | ||
Stanisław Konarski - człowiek, który odważył się myśleć
Stanislaw Konarski (actual name: Hieronim Konarski; 30 September 1700 – 3 August 1773) was a Polish pedagogue, educational reformer, political writer, poet, dramatist, Piarist priest and precursor of the Enlightenment in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Konarski was born in Zarczyce Duze, Swietokrzyskie Voivodeship. He studied from 1725 to 1727 at the Collegium Nazarenum in Rome, where he became a teacher of rhetoric. After that he travelled through France, Germany and Austria and Poland to broaden his education.
In 1730 he returned to Poland and began work on a new edition of Polish law, the Volumina legum.
From 1736 he taught at the Collegium Resoviense in Rzeszow. In 1740 he founded the Collegium Nobilium, an elite Warsaw school for sons of the gentry (szlachta). He founded the first public-reference library on the European mainland in 1747 in Warsaw. Thereafter he reformed Piarist education in Poland, in accordance with his educational program, the Ordinationes Visitationis Apostolicae... (1755). His reforms became a landmark in the 18th-century struggle to modernize the Polish education system.
Early on, Konarski was associated politically with King Stanislaw Leszczynski; later, with the Czartoryski "Familia" and King Stanislaw August Poniatowski. He participated in the latter's famous "Thursday dinners." Stanislaw August caused a medal to be struck in Konarski's honour, with his likeness and the motto, from Horace, Sapere auso ("Dare to know!"). Konarski argued very strongly that the right of veto that had traditionally been exercised by the Polish Nobility was not law but a custom.
In his most important work, the four-part O skutecznym rad sposobie albo o utrzymywaniu ordynaryinych seymow (On an effective way of councils or on the conduct of ordinary sejms, 1760-1763), he unveiled a far-reaching reform program for the Polish parliamentary system and political reorganization of the Commonwealth's central government, which included aiding the monarch with a permanent governing council.
Konarski died, aged 72, in Warsaw, Poland. His heart is buried in an urn in the Piarist church in Cracow. His bust can be seen at the entrance to the crypt of this church placed on ulica Swietego Jana.
