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Teaching played a major role among the religious ministries undertaken by the Catholic Church of the Counter-Reformation. Besides representing a unique kind of action among human society, it allowed the Church to supervise the processes of acculturation and the transmission of knowledge. Such an activity was mainly entrusted to the new religious orders, whose growth since the beginning of fifteenth century represents one of the main aspects of the Church’s renewal during the early Modern Age. Devotion to spiritual and intellectual instruction was not indeed an absolute novelty in the Church’s history, given that medieval religious orders such as Dominicans and Franciscans had already taught their novices in studia (structures specifically conceived for that aim). There was, however, one basic difference: the new religious orders used to teach not only their young members, but also external pupils. In this way, the Catholic Church could on one hand acquire an excellent medium for propagating Christian teachings, and could make up for the absence of a state educational system on the other. In fact, until the mid-eighteenth century, most European states had not started a real public education, and when this was eventually set up, it was not surprising that priests were most often required as teaching staff. The Society of Jesus had an unquestioned preeminence among the religious orders devoted to education. This is not only due to the precocity with which this activity was undertaken in comparison with the other orders, but also to the serious pedagogic investigation that supported teaching, and the wide European spread of their prestigious colleges of education. The solidity and the rigor of the Jesuit educational model were well spelled out in the code known as the Ratio studiorum which regulated the life of Jesuit colleges from1599 to the suppression of the Society of Jesus (1773) without undergoing substantial changes. Besides the Jesuits, other orders and congregations distinguished themselves by a particular interest in education between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, namely the Barnabites, Somascans, and Piarists. Such institutions have for a long time been unduly regarded as mere followers in the steps of the Jesuits, although they elaborated widely original schemes of instruction. This originality presented various aspects. Firstly, there was the adoption of syllabi different from the ones used by the Jesuits, both in terms of the length of the courses and the emphasis on certain subjects instead of others. Secondly, each order created its own school text books, often written in the vernacular (not in Latin, beloved by Jesuits), and with deliberate characteristics of brevity, clarity, and simplicity. Finally, the rules that governed the staff training and career were totally independent from those in use among the Society of Jesus. In the case of the Piarists, an order founded (unlike all the others) for specifically educational purposes, the originality of the teaching model had further aspects. On the one hand, the successors of St. José de Calasanz concentrated themselves solely on pupils belonging to the lower ranks of society (at least in the first decades of the order’s history), whereas Jesuits, as everyone knows, attracted students of higher backgrounds. On the other, they limited their teaching to reading, writing, and arithmetic, giving up secondary instruction. The order maintained its own original identity even when this exclusive option was abandoned afterwards, both showing a more marked open-mindedness (in comparison with Jesuits) regarding thought streams like Rationalism and Enlightenment, and developing more up-to-date teaching programs and methods.