Specimen and student academies in Albania
July: the baccalaureate exams are over, the last orals are taking place these very days, meanwhile in universities the summer session of exams is underway. Today’s column is a tribute to today’s students busy with these milestones in their studies.
Many of us took our baccalaureate examinations on the basis of the classic thesis, and later graduated by discussing a thesis; these papers are not just a product of the school reforms of recent decades.
In the Colleges of the Society of Jesus, as well as in other educational institutions, students at the end of the year, or at the end of the course, had to prepare small papers that gave an account of their education and what they had learned during the year. They were also judged on these papers and often had to present them in front of the whole college assembled for the ‘academies’.
Today we focus on the papers of students enrolled at the College of the Society of Jesus in Shkodra, at the turn of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century.
Our historical archives also contain the fonds of individual schools, from which the photos of some illustrious former pupils we have dealt with in previous columns came. School documentation, however, can also be found in the fonds of individual provinces.
Precisely during the reorganisation of the Veneto-Milan Province Fund, this nucleus of essays, specimens and academies from the St Francis Xavier College in Shkodra emerged.
All the students, from every college, were subjected to the preparation of these essays, so why dwell precisely on these essays from Shkodra?
As you can see from the photo, which accompanies the column, the essays are accompanied by special graphics, handmade by the authors of the essays themselves.
There are about a hundred essays on various topics: from mathematics to Latin, from the Italian language to history.
The drawings, very accurate, have various subjects: angels, children, a vessel sailing the seas, garlands, shepherds, bucolic landscapes.
The corpus of Scutarine essays and specimens is unique, not only because of the presence of drawings accompanying the essays, but also because for other schools, we do not have such a large quantity of essays, which makes them all the more worthy of attention by scholars wishing to study pedagogy and education in the college of ‘Scutari d’Albania’, as the city was referred to in the papers of the time.
Maria Macchi
