José de Calasanz was born in Peralta de la Sal in Aragon, educated at Lleida and Valencia, ordained priest in 1583, and served twelve years as canon and vicar in the Aragonese dioceses of Urgell, Tarragona, and Lleida. In 1592 he travelled to Rome (where he intended a brief curial visit) and remained for the remaining fifty-six years of his life.
In Rome he discovered the scale of childhood poverty in the great city: thousands of poor boys begging on the streets, illiterate, with no access to the small fee-paying schools of the period. In 1597 he founded the first free school for poor boys in the modern world — the Scuole Pie ('Pious Schools') in the parish of Santa Dorotea in Trastevere. The school was free, accepted boys of any race or background, taught reading, writing, arithmetic, Latin, and catechism, and supported its students with daily bread and clothing. Within a decade Roman parents from the poorest backgrounds were sending two thousand sons to his schools.
Pope Paul V approved the school in 1614, and in 1621 Gregory XV confirmed the Pious Schools as a full religious order — the Order of Clerics Regular of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools (the Piarists, or Scolopians). The Piarists were the first Catholic religious order whose distinctive specific ministry was the universal, free education of poor boys — they preceded the Jesuit-La Salle teaching congregations on this specific point by half a century. By Calasanz's death the Piarists had schools across Italy, Spain, central Europe, and the Holy Roman Empire. He died at Rome in August 1648 at ninety-one. Canonized 1767. Pius XII declared him the universal patron of all Christian and popular schooling in 1948.