Chapter II: John Amos Comenius

(1592-1670)

The movement for the new Christian education, identified with the Reformation, the effort to establish and spread the new realistic learning, represented by Bacon, were struggling against the inertia of prejudice and tradition when Comenius came to the world to unify these two tendencies and lay the foundations of the modern Protestant school, nay, even to build its framework. Born in a devout Moravian family, studying under the most advanced scholars in the most progressive universities of the time, becoming the pastor and leader of his church by vocation, the teacher and director of several schools by avocation, his external circumstances, together with his inborn disposition, made him “the greatest pedagogical writer of the seventeenth century.” In him the educational ideas and ideals of the age find the most comprehensive and systematic embodiment.

The great educational awakening of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the demand for equal, universal enlightenment as opposed to class education; for the upbuilding of Christian manhood; for citizenship instead of purely monastic and humanistic training; for the introduction of method and system into school instruction to remedy the prevailing chaotic condition; for a natural method in discipline as opposed to harmful artificiality; for making the vernacular instead of the ancient classics the basis and means of learning. These demands found expression in the writings of such men as Luther and Bacon, and also Vives, Ratke, Rabelais, Campanella, Andreä, Alsted, etc. Comenius studied the writings of these men with his judicious and comprehensive mind and, aided by his direct experience, built upon this study that great system of pedagogy, which Professor Laurie of Edinburgh, speaks of as “the only thoroughgoing treatise on educational method that has yet appeared in the history of the world” (11: p. 153).

However much he may owe to his predecessors and contemporaries, he it was who gave a coherency and a larger relation to what was partially expressed by others; who carried into details and practical applications what before was treated only in a general manner.

To restore fallen humanity to the image of God was the first and last aim of education as conceived by him. Thus, education and religion were one for him, as they were to Luther. His philosophy of education is, in its fundamentals, really nothing else than the most intelligent pedagogical application of the Bible. It may be called the pedagogy of Protestant Christianity.

In the “Great Didactic,” Comenius begins by picturing in biblical terminology the destined glory of man. He is God’s likeness, God’s delight. For his use God designed the heaven, the earth, and all that is in them; to him alone God gave all those things in conjunction, which to the rest of creation He gave but singly--namely, Existence, Vitality, Sense, Reason. And to him, finally, God gave Himself in personal communion, joining his nature to His, for eternity. “Know therefore that thou art the corner-stone and epitome of my works, the representative of God among them, the crown of my glory” (2:p. 178).

Human life is a gradual, successive, and eternal development. “Whatever we are, do, think, speak, contrive, acquire, or possess, contains a principle of gradation, and, though we mount perpetually and attain higher grades, we still continue to advance and never reach the highest” (2: p. 180). The earth, therefore, must not be the end of our life, the final goal for which we strive, but only the beginning, the preparation, for an everlasting heaven where we find the fullness of all. The world is nothing but “our nursery,” “our school,” and “our workshop.” Accordingly, a purely secular education falls far short of its true function. We ought to prepare a child not only for this life, but for the life beyond. The inculcation of piety is thus the most important thing in education.

The perfection of all the faculties we have in us, which is the ultimate goal of man, and in which lies his highest felicity, can be viewed from three aspects: the perfection of knowledge, of power, of heart, which “are so joined together that they cannot be separated.” Perfection of knowledge consists in being acquainted with the properties of all things in the world, including the knowledge of man himself. By the perfection of power is meant the ability to have control over all things and over himself. The man of power directs everything to its legitimate end, and subjects it to man’s own use; he conducts himself royally--that is, “gravely and righteously among creatures.” The perfection of heart is piety; it aims to embody the perfection of Christ, the archetype of man.

Comenius believes that man’s original nature is good. There is, in every man, a tendency toward every perfection--an infinite possibility or a possibility of the infinite. However, man is born only with the potentiality, thus he has the possibility of degeneration as well as of perfection. Hence the necessity of human striving, of education. “The seeds of knowledge, of virtue, and of piety are naturally implanted in us; but the actual knowledge, virtue, and piety are not given. These must be acquired by prayer, by education, and by action” (2: p. 204). Every individual has the possibility, the right, and the duty to be a man, to realize his final destiny, as a rational creature, the lord of other creatures, the image of his creator; and “it is only by a proper education that he can become a man” (2: p. 204). From this it naturally follows that education, in its essentials, should be universal and equal for all, without regard to the difference between rich and poor, boys and girls, noble and humble, dull and intelligent.

Comenius shared, with most of the educational writers, ancient and modern, the view that education should begin as early as possible. He assigned six reasons for this: First, because we do not know when the child will be taken from his preparatory life on earth; second, shortness of time compared with the infiniteness of learning and manifoldness of duty to be prepared; third, because “it is the nature of everything that comes into being, that while tender it is easily bent and formed, but that when it has grown hard, it is not easy to alter”; fourth, God has granted man the years of youth, “unsuitable for everything but education,” which are much longer than in animals; fifth, the influence of early impressions is the most lasting and potent; sixth, the mind of man seeks constantly for some activity, and, “if not engaged with what is useful, it occupies with the vainest and even with harmful things,” of which the world is full. “If, then, each man have the welfare of his own children at heart, and if that of the human race be dear to the civil and ecclesiastical guardians of human affairs, let them hasten to make provision for timely planting, pruning, and watering of the plants of heaven, that these may be prudently formed to make prosperous advances in letters, virtue, and piety” (2: pp. 210-212).

The necessity of equal, universal education of the young calls for the universal establishment of schools. In the home lies the foundation of education, and parents are naturally to be the first teachers, but modern society requires more in the way of education than the home can provide. The advantages of the school over the home can be enumerated as follows:

1. “It is very seldom that parents have sufficient ability or sufficient leisure to teach their children,” and “this is a marvelous saving of labor, when one man, undisturbed by other claims on his attention, confines himself to one thing; in this way one man can be of use to many and many to one” (2: p. 215).

2. Group life affords many benefits and advantages of its own. “Better results and more pleasures are to be obtained when one pupil serves as an example and a stimulus for another” (2: p. 215). Emulation and imitation, which are strong instincts in children, can operate best when a certain equality of capacity and interest, and consequently easy mutual understanding, exist. In this sense children are the best instructors and trainers of children.

3. To secure the best development of the child, a place, specified for the sole and definite end, with an ample provision and a regulated environment, is needed. As young plants are transplanted from their seed beds into the orchards or garden, so children should, after being cherished in the maternal bosom, be delivered into the school, the soil specially prepared for them, in order to grow more vigorously and successfully.

Thus the school, with its specially prepared teachers and accommodations, with its ample mental nourishment, its pleasant, healthy, and stimulating environment, its regular systematic work, and equipment especially adapted to its ends, should become the center for the advancement and propagation of knowledge and the fittest soil for the growth of the young generation. In Comenius’s own words, “As workshops supply manufactured goods, churches supply piety, and law courts justice, why should not schools produce, purify, and multiply the light of wisdom, and distribute it to the whole body of human community?” (2: p. 216).

Comenius’s demand upon and hope in the school was great. The school that fulfils its function perfectly is “one which is a true forging-place of men; where the minds of those who learn are illuminated by the light of wisdom, so as to penetrate with ease all that is manifest and all that is secret, where the emotions and desires are brought into harmony with virtue, and where the heart is filled and permeated by divine love, so that all who are handed over to Christian schools to be imbued with true wisdom may be taught to live a heavenly life on earth; in a word, where all men are taught all things thoroughly” (2: p. 228).

With this ideal, the reformer naturally found that “hitherto there have been no perfect schools,” and the present state of things is most unsatisfactory. “The method used in instructing the young has generally been so severe that schools have been looked on as terrors for boys and shambles for their intellects, and the greater number of students, having contracted a dislike for learning and for books, have hastened away to the workshops of artificers or to some other occupation.... Piety and virtue, which form the most important element in education, were neglected more than anything else, ... so that for the most part, instead of tractable lambs, fiery wild asses and restive mules were produced; and instead of characters molded to virtue, nothing issued from the schools but a spurious veneer of morality, a fastidious and exotic clothing of culture, and eyes, hands, and feet trained to worldly vanities” (2: pp. 229-230).

Even in intellectual culture, which had been almost their sole concern, the result achieved is pitifully poor. “For five, ten, or more years they detained the mind over matters that could be mastered in one. What could have been gently instilled into the intellect, was violently impressed upon it, nay rather stuffed and flogged into it. What might have been placed before the mind plainly and lucidly, was treated of obscurely, perplexedly, and intricately, as if it were a complicated riddle. In addition, ... the intellect was scarcely ever nourished by the actual facts, but was filled with the husks of words, with a windy and parrot-like loquacity, and with the chaff of opinions” (2: pp. 230-231).

Consequently, Comenius proposed a thoroughgoing reform of the schools, to base them upon the Christian principle, and to introduce a change in subject-matter, discipline, and method of instruction. “All those subjects which are able to make a man wise, virtuous and pious” were to be taught; not Latin, as had been customary, but vernacular language should be the chief instrument of learning. “This education shall be conducted without blows, rigour, or compulsion, ... and in the most natural manner” (2: p. 233). The student “shall not merely read the opinions of others and grasp their meaning or commit them to memory and repeat them, but shall himself penetrate to the root of things and acquire the habit of genuinely understanding and making use of what he learns” (2: p. 234). As to method, the most easy, natural, economical, and efficient way of learning must be investigated and established.

Method is the great thing in the pedagogy of Comenius. To find out the universal rules which can be applied to all pupils in all cases was his chief task, and herein lies the main contribution he made to the subsequent progress of educational art. He says:

“The art of teaching, therefore, demands nothing more than the skilful arrangement of time, of the subjects taught, and of the method. As soon as we have succeeded in finding the proper method it will be no harder to teach school-boys, in any number desired, than with the help of the printing-press to cover a thousand sheets daily with the neatest writing, or with Archimedes’s machine to move houses, towers, and immense weights, or to cross the ocean in a ship, and journey to the New World. The whole process, too, will be as free from friction as is the movement of a clock whose motive power is supplied by the weights. It will be as pleasant to see education carried out on my plan as to look at an automatic machine of this kind, and the process will be as free from failure as are these mechanical contrivances when skilfully made” (2: pp. 248-249).

The form of argumentation by which Comenius endeavors to establish his methodology is quite mediæval and often ludicrous. It rests largely on the exaggerated, sometimes misapplied analogies from Nature and mechanics, and evidences from the Bible. But it also contains many pedagogical truths embodied in the schoolrooms of our day. To epitomize the general principles of his methodology, the process of teaching should begin with the most plastic mind of early childhood in slow progressive order, proceeding always from the general to the specific, from what is easy to what is more difficult, following the natural interests of the child, paying a due consideration to his age, mental capacity, and development; everything being taught first through the medium of the senses, a special emphasis being laid upon logical sequence and ideational correlation between the different subjects and different parts of the same subject; only those subjects that are of real use should be taken in hand, everything of little importance being invariably discarded, and the purpose and use of everything taught should be constantly kept in view. He advocates that everything should be taught according to one and the same method; there should be only one teacher in each school, or at any rate in each class; that only one author should be used for each subject studied, and the same exercise should be given the whole class.

The method of teaching arts, sciences, languages, morals, and instilling piety is each and severally discussed. But a large part of Comenius’s time and energy was devoted to the reform of language teaching and to the writing of text-books for it. And by this work alone he was known in Europe during nearly two hundred years of practical oblivion after his death.

With his methodization of the process of instruction necessarily went the systematizing of school organization. The entire educational system is graded by him as follows: I. The home as a preparatory school for infancy. II. The vernacular school for childhood. III. The Latin school or gymnasium for boyhood. IV. The university and travel for youth. He considers the first twenty-four years of human life as the period of growth and plasticity, and recognizes in it four distinct stages, each of which contains six years. In his idea of a mother-school he anticipates Froebel’s kindergarten, and in his sketch of the vernacular and Latin school we see the archetype of the modern graded school.

As a summary of his whole pedagogy nothing better can be offered than the title page of his work, which so well reflects the characteristics of his book and that of the age:

The Great Didactic

Setting forth

The Whole Art of Teaching
All Things to all Men

or

A Certain Inducement to found such Schools in all
the Parishes, Towns, and Villages of every
Christian Kingdom, that the entire
Youth of both Sexes, none
being excepted, shall

_Quickly, Pleasantly, & Thoroughly_

Become learned in the Sciences, pure in Morals,
trained to Piety, and in this manner
instructed in all things necessary
for the present and for
the future life,

in which, with respect to everything that is suggested,

+Its Fundamental Principles+ are set forth from the
essential nature of matter,
+Its Truth+ is proved by examples from the several
mechanical arts,
+Its Order+ is clearly set forth in years, months, days,
and hours, and finally,
+An easy and sure Method+ is shown by which it can
be pleasantly brought into existence.

Comenius has not lacked his admirers in every land. To-day he must especially appeal to the educational thinkers and administrators of the orthodox type of mind. But this great architectonic genius and scholarly reformer has naturally won the best recognition in Germany. Spielmann even goes so far in his admiration as to say:

“If all the pedagogical writings of all ages had been lost and the great didactic alone remained it would have sufficed as a basis for the later generation to build the science of education anew” (25: p. 28).

He might indeed be blamed for putting too much confidence in the power of school education, and laying too much emphasis on method and system with too little on the personal force of the educator. Yet he deserves our remembrance as one who has left us the most comprehensive system of pedagogy, in which one of the greatest civilizing agents, nay, probably even the greatest, in modern communities--the universal public school--is foreshadowed in its fundamentals and in its details. If Bacon, as the greatest apostle of the new learning, proclaimed the gospel of knowledge, Comenius, as the greatest apostle of the new education, proclaimed the gospel of the school. And as the former rescued knowledge from fossilization by uniting her with her true spouse, the reality of nature and life, so the latter vitalized the school by giving it its glorious function, the forging shop, the nursery garden of the human race. Through it not only do individuals become able to attain their destiny as individuals, but the solidity and prosperity of social institutions rest upon it.

The Reformation ideal finds its culmination in the educational scheme of Comenius. Erudition, which was formerly only the privilege of scholars; morality, which used to be required only from the so-called guardian or citizen class; piety, which was left to the priesthood--were now all made the common ideals for every individual, to be striven for without regard to sex, occupation, or rank.

REFERENCES

1. +Adamson, John William.+ Pioneers of Modern Education, 1600-1700. University Press, Cambridge, 1905. 285 pages.

2. +Comenius, John Amos.+ The Great Didactic. Translated, with introduction, biographical and historical, by M. W. Keatinge. Black, London, 1896. 468 pages.

3. ---- School of Infancy; an Essay on the Education of Youth during the First Six Years. Edited, with an introduction and notes, by W. S. Monroe. Heath & Co., Boston, 1896. 99 pages.

4. +Compayré, Jules Gabriel.+ History of Pedagogy. Translated, with an introduction, notes, and index, by W. H. Payne. Heath & Co., Boston, 1899. 589 pages.

5. +Hähner, H.+ Natur und Naturmässigkeit bei Comenius und Pestalozzi. Lamprecht, Chemnitz, 1890. 87 pages.

6. +Heman, Friedrich.+ Geschichte der neueren Pädagogik. Zickfeldt, Osterwieck, 1904. 436 pages.

7. +Heubaum, Alfred.+ Geschichte des deutschen Bildungswesens seit der Mitte des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts. Vol. I. Bis zum Beginn der allgemeinen Unterrichtsreform unter Friedrich dem Grossen. Weidmann, Berlin, 1905. 402 pages.

8. +Hoffmeister, Hermann Wilhelm.+ Comenius und Pestalozzi als Begründer der Volkschule. Second revised edition. Klinkhardt, Leipzig, 1896. 97 pages.

9. +Kerrl, Th.+ Johann Amos Comenius. Sein Leben, seine pädagogischen Schriften und seine Bedeutung. 4 vols. Schroebel, Halle a. Saale, 1904-1905. 389 pages.

10. +Laurie, Simon Somerville.+ John Amos Comenius. Small, Boston, 1885. 229 pages.

11. ---- Studies in the History of Educational Opinions from the Renaissance. University Press, Cambridge, 1903. 261 pages.

12. +Melchers, Karl.+ Comenius und Pestalozzi; eine vergleichende Betrachtung ihrer Grundideen. Schmidt, Bremen, 1896. 47 pages.

13. +Möhrke, Max August Heinrich.+ Johann Amos Comenius und Johann Valentin Andreä. Glausch, Leipzig, 1904. 168 pages.

14. Monathefte der Comenius-gesellschaft. Comenius-gesellschaft. Charlottenburg, Berlin, 1892-1908.

15. +Monroe, Paul.+ A Text-book in the History of Education. Macmillan & Co., London and New York, 1905. 772 pages.

16. +Monroe, William Seymour.+ Comenius and the Beginning of Educational Reform. Scribner, New York, 1900. 184 pages.

17. +Müller, Walter.+ Comenius, ein Systematiker in der Pädagogik. Bleyl & Kämmer, Dresden, 1887. 50 pages.

18. +Munroe, James Phinney.+ The Educational Ideal: an Outline of Its Growth in Modern Times. Heath & Co., Boston, 1896. 262 pages.

19. +Pappenheim, Eug.+ Amos Comenius, der Begründer der neueren Pädagogik. Ackermann, München, 1871. 66 pages.

20. +Quick, Robert Hebert.+ Essays on Educational Reformers. Appleton, New York, 1890. 560 pages. The same. (International Education Series), 1903. 568 pages.

21. +Raumer, Karl von.+ Geschichte der Pädagogik vom Wiederaufblühen klassischer Studien bis auf unsere Zeit. 5 vols. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh, 1882-1897. Vols. I and III.

22. +Rein, Georg Wilhelm.+ Encyklopädisches Handbuch der Pädagogik. 8 vols. Beyer, Langensalza, 1895-1906. Vol. I.

23. +Scherer, Heinrich.+ Die Pädagogik in ihrer Entwicklung im Zusammenhange mit dem Kultur- und Geistesleben und ihrem Einfluss auf die Gestaltung des Erziehungs- und Bildungswesens. Vol. I. Die Pädagogik vor Pestalozzi. Brandstetter, Leipzig, 1897. 581 pages.

24. +Schmid, Karl Adolf+, editor. Geschichte der Erziehung vom Anfang an bis auf unsere Zeit. 5 vols. Cotta, Stuttgart, 1884-1903. Vol. III.

25. +Spielmann, C. Christian.+ Die Meister der Pädagogik nach ihren Leben, ihren Werken, und ihrer Bedeutung. Heufer, Neuwied, 1904-1905. 361 pages. Part II.

26. +Witte, J.+ Johann Amos Comenius in seiner kulturgeschichtlichen Stellung und seiner historischen Bedeutung für die Entwicklung des Schulwesens, im Besonderen, der Volkschule. Andreæ, Ruhrort, 1892. 51 pages.

27. +Ziegler, Theobald.+ Geschichte der Pädagogik mit besonderer Rücksicht auf das höhere Unterrichtswesen. Beck, München, 1895. 361 pages.