When he turned nine he was sent to the Catholic Piarist Fathers College at Lubieszow, near Pinsk. There he followed a new syllabus set up by Father Stanislaw Konarski, the Piarist leader of a cadre of reformist priests who were revolutionizing Poland’s school system. They instituted a curriculum that included lessons about British philosopher John Locke’s theory of a social contract, in which the people of a nation consent to be governed in exchange for social order.12 The Poles had already experimented with their own form of democracy, but Father Konarski’s educational reforms were laying the
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