35. Cultural role of Ostrih Academy

OSTRIH ACADEMY: EASTERN EUROPE'S FIRST INSTITUTION OF HIGHER LEARNING.Founded ca 1576 in Ostrih, Volhynia, by a Ukrainian nobleman Prince Kostiantyn Vasyl Ostrozky--one of the most remarkable figures in the 16th-century Ukrainian cultural and national rebirth--the Ostih Academy was the first postsecondary learning center in the Orthodox Eastern Europe. At a time when Catholicism was making inroads into Western Ukraine, the academy was a bastion of Orthodoxy and Ruthenian culture and maintained the traditional orientation toward Constantinople. Though the Ostrih Academy did not develop into a Western European-style university, as Ostrozky had hoped, it was the foremost Orthodox academy of its time. Closely associated with the Ostrih Press, the academy and the Ostrih intellectual circle had an enduring influence on pedagogical thought and the organization of schools in Ukraine and provided a model for the brotherhood schools that were later founded in Lviv, Lutsk, Volodymyr-Volynskyi, Vilnius, and Brest. With the founding of a rival Jesuit college in Ostrih in 1624, the academy went into decline, and by 1636 it had ceased to exist.

36. Kyivan Mohyla Academy

The leading center of higher education in 17th- and 18th-century Ukraine, which exerted a significant intellectual influence over the entire Orthodox world at the time. Established in 1632 by Petro Mohyla through the merger of the Kyiv Epiphany Brotherhood School with the Kyivan Cave Monastery School (est 1631 by Mohyla), the new school was conceived by its founder as an academy, ie, an institution of higher learning offering philosophy and theology courses and supervising a network of secondary schools. Completing the Orthodox school system, it was to compete on an equal footing with Polish academies run by the Jesuits. Fearing such competition, King Władysław IV Vasa granted the school the status of a mere college or secondary school, and prohibited it from teaching philosophy and theology. It was only in 1694 that the Kyivan Mohyla College was granted the full privileges of an academy, and only in 1701 that it was recognized officially as an academy by Peter I.