The Origins of Polish Students Scientific Movement

The aim of the thesis is to present the origins of students scientific movement on the historically Polish territory and the answer to the question: where the structures we know today come from. This topic is important because the extra-curricular activity of students, its verve and directions, highlights the effectiveness of higher education. The facts for this article were provided by historical source data and publications of memoirs. The effects of the query were presented chronologically. The main conclusion of the study is the statement that: student organizations arise due to structural deficiencies in a system. The origins of scientific circles is to be found as early as the 16th century. These were Jesuit academies and schools founded by the Piarst Order in their precincts (cyrkuły) . A larger revival in this area, however, happened in the 19th century when students started to organize scientific societies. One of their secondary objectives was to improve future professional skills and to develop scientific interests. The main function was to carry out activities of patriotic nature. An important organizational form in the student scientific circles constituted the Academic Libraries and Reading Rooms, for example, Towarzystwo Biblioteki Słuchaczów Prawa of the Jagiellonian University (1951), and Czytelnia Akademicka UJK (1867). They did not have much in common with the modern institutions of the same name. Their history is presented in this thesis, because it is a rarely taken up subject in the history of science. The first scientific circles were created half a century later, bore the name of "clubs" and were not described by the adjective "scientific". They were dependent on the above mentioned Reading Rooms and Libraries. The last part of the thesis encompasses a comparison of the above presented forms of organization in terms of their size, the degree of formalization and the level of institutionalization.