|
|
John Amos Comenius
 |
born March 28, 1592, Nivnice, Moravia,
Habsburg domain [now in Czech Republic]
died Nov. 15, 1670, Amsterdam, Neth.
|
| Czech Jan Ámos Komenský |
|
Czech educational reformer and religious leader, remembered
mainly for his innovations in methods of teaching, especially
languages. He favoured the learning of Latin to facilitate
the study of European culture. Janua Linguarum Reserata (1631;
Gate of Tongues Unlocked, 1633?) revolutionized Latin teaching
and was translated into 16 languages.
|
Life
Comenius was the only son of respected members of a Protestant
group known as the Bohemian Brethren. His parents died when
he was 12, and after four unhappy years he was sent to school
at Prerov. Though the teaching methods there were poor, he
was befriended by a headmaster who recognized his gifts and
encouraged him to train for the ministry. At the University
of Heidelberg, Germany, he came under the influence of Protestant
millennialists, who believed that men could achieve salvation
on earth. He also read with enthusiasm the works of Francis
Bacon and returned home convinced that the millennium could
be attained with the aid of science.
As a young minister Comenius found life wholly satisfying,
but the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War in 1618 and the
emperor Ferdinand II's determination to re-Catholicize Bohemia
forced him and other Protestant leaders to flee. While in
hiding, he wrote an allegory, The Labyrinth of the World
and the Paradise of the Heart, in which he described both
his despair and his sources of consolation. With a band
of Brethren he escaped to Poland and in 1628 settled in
Leszno. Believing that the Protestants would eventually
win and liberate Bohemia, he began to prepare for the day
when it would be possible to rebuild society there through
a reformed educational system. He wrote a “Brief Proposal”
advocating full-time schooling for all the youth of the
nation and maintaining that they should be taught both their
native culture and the culture of Europe.
|
|
Educational reform
The reform of the educational system would require two things.
First, a revolution in methods of teaching was necessary
so that learning might become rapid, pleasant, and thorough.
Teachers ought to “follow in the footsteps of nature,”
meaning that they ought to pay attention to the mind of
the child and to the way the student learned. Comenius made
this the theme of The Great Didactic and also of The School
of Infancy—a book for mothers on the early years of
childhood. Second, to make European culture accessible to
all children, it was necessary that they learn Latin. But
Comenius was certain that there was a better way of teaching
Latin than by the inefficient and pedantic methods then
in use; he advocated “nature's way,” that is,
learning about things and not about grammar. To this end
he wrote Janua Linguarum Reserata, a textbook that described
useful facts about the world in both Latin and Czech, side
by side; thus, the pupils could compare the two languages
and identify words with things. Translated into German,
the Janua soon became famous throughout Europe and was subsequently
translated into a number of European and Asian languages.
Comenius wrote that he was “encouraged beyond expectation”
by the book's reception.
With the liberation of Bohemia less certain than before,
Comenius turned to an even more ambitious project—the
reform of human society through education. Others in Europe
shared his vision, among them a German merchant living in
London, Samuel Hartlib, who invited Comenius to England
to establish a college of social reform. With approval from
the Brethren, Comenius went to London in 1641, reporting
back that he had been “fitted out with new clothes
befitting an English divine.” He met a number of influential
men, engaged in much discussion, and wrote essays of which
the most notable was The Way of Light, which set out his
program. Parliament went so far as to consider setting up
a college “for a number of men from all nations.”
This prospect was shattered by the outbreak of the English
Civil War, however, and Comenius was obliged to leave the
country in 1642. He had been invited to France by Cardinal
Richelieu; and the American John Winthrop, Jr., who was
in Europe looking for an educator-theologian to become president
of Harvard College, may have met Comenius. Instead, Comenius
accepted an offer from the government of Sweden to help
reform its schools by writing a series of textbooks modeled
on his Janua.
He interpreted his agreement with the Swedish government
as entitling him to base his textbooks on a system of philosophy
he had evolved called “pansophy” (see below).
After struggling hard to produce them, however, he found
that they failed to satisfy anyone. Nevertheless, in the
course of his stay at Elbing, he tried to lay a philosophical
foundation for a science of pedagogy. In The Analytical
Didactic, forming part of his Newest Method of Languages,
he reinterpreted the principle of nature that he had described
in The Great Didactic as a principle of logic. He put forward
certain self-evident principles from which he derived a
number of maxims, some of them full of common sense and
others rather platitudinous. His chief attention was directed
to his system of pansophy. Ever since his student days he
had been seeking a basic principle by which all knowledge
could be harmonized. He believed that men could be trained
to see the underlying harmony of the universe and thus to
overcome its apparent disharmony. He wrote that: pansophy
propoundeth to itself so to expand and lay open to the eyes
of all the wholeness of things that everything might be
pleasurable in itself and necessary for the expanding of
the appetite. The “expanding of the appetite”
for pansophic understanding became his great aim, spelled
out in “A General Consultation Concerning the Improvement
of Human Affairs.”
|
|
Social reform.
The Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years'
War, was a blow to Comenius and other Czech exiles, who
thereby lost their last hope of a restoration of ethnic
and religious liberty in their homeland. Few of them returned,
since they would have been required to recant their beliefs.
Comenius left Elbing and returned to Poland, where the Brethren
at Leszno had been cast into despair. In 1648 he was consecrated
presiding bishop of the Moravians, the last of the Bohemian-Moravian
clergy to hold this office.
His next invitation came from Hungary, where the young
prince Zsigmond Rákóczi wanted to establish
a model pansophic school at Sárospatak. Comenius,
arriving there in 1650, received a warm reception. The school
opened with about 100 pupils, but it proved unsuccessful.
The students were ill-prepared to learn anything beyond
the rudiments of reading and writing, and the teachers soon
lost interest in a scheme they could not understand. The
prince died in 1652, and at about the same time war broke
out in Poland.
Comenius returned to Leszno, carrying with him the manuscript
of a picture textbook he had written for his pupils but
for which he had not yet been able to obtain the necessary
woodcuts. He sent the manuscript to Nürnberg in Germany,
where the cuts were made. The resulting book, Orbis Sensualium
Pictus (1658; The Visible World in Pictures), was popular
in Europe for two centuries and was the forerunner of the
illustrated schoolbook of later times. It consisted of pictures
illustrating Latin sentences, accompanied by vernacular
translations. For example, the chapter “The Head and
the Hand” began with a picture of a head and two hands
followed by sentences such as:
In the Head are, the Hair, 1. [which is Combed with a Comb,
2.] two Ears, 3. the Temples, 4. and the Face, 5. . . .
In Capite sunt Capillus, 1. [qui pectitur Pectine 2.] Aures
3. binae, & Tempora, 4. Facies, 5.
Comenius had not been back in Leszno long before it was
occupied and destroyed, with the loss of many of his manuscripts.
He escaped to Amsterdam, where he remained for the rest
of his life. In 1657 he gathered together most of his writings
on education and published them as a collection, Didactica
Opera Omnia. He devoted his remaining years to completing
his great work, Consultation. He managed to get parts of
it published, and when he was dying in 1670 he begged his
close associates to publish the rest of it after his death.
They failed to do so, and the manuscripts were lost until
1935, when they were found in an orphanage in Halle, Ger.
|
|
Assessment
During his lifetime the fame of Comenius rested chiefly
on his two popular textbooks, the Janua and the Orbis Sensualium
Pictus. He himself would have set more store by his influence
as a social reformer, which reached its peak during his
visit to England. Men all over Europe had looked to Comenius
as a leader; his vision had impressed both those who were
seeking a more dynamic form of religion and those who looked
to science as an avenue of reform. His pansophism, on the
other hand, was not influential either during his lifetime
or afterward. His dream of universal harmony was too vague
and too grandiose for the mental outlook of the 17th century,
which was already shifting in a utilitarian and materialistic
direction; it has had even less appeal in modern times.
As a religious leader Comenius helped keep alive the faith
of his church in its darkest hour, and he provided the inspiration
that led to its subsequent revival as the Moravian Church
under Nikolaus, Graf von Zinzendorf, in the 18th century.
He was no sectarian but a champion of the church universal.
He was also, for all of his internationalism, a Czech patriot
at a time when the Czechs had been nearly crushed. He wrote:
“I love my country and its language, and my greatest
wish is that it should be cultivated.”
In the 19th century Comenius' reputation was revived by
the increasing attention given to the study of pedagogy,
especially in Germany. At the present day he remains of
interest as a prototype of the international citizen. His
patriotic feelings for Germany did not prevent him from
feeling himself a European and from believing profoundly
in the unity of mankind.
|
|
