COMENIUS (KOMENŠKY), JAN AMOS. - Czech pedagogue, b. at Niunice, in Moravia, on 28 March 1592, d. at Amsterdam on 15 Nov. 1670.
LIFE
The information about his very troubled life is somewhat uncertain. He belonged to the "Unity of the Bohemian Brethren," one of the earliest Pietist Protestant sects. He lost his parents early, and later he had to lament the delay with which they set him to study: hence his first reflections and experiences on the education of the young. Having then passed from the school of Pferou, in Bohemia, to the Calvinist University of Herboru, he had as his teacher of philosophy John Henry Alsted.
He then composed a Lexicon latino-boemum and conceived a vast encyclopedia: Amphitheatrum universitatis rerum. In 1614-16, having returned to his homeland, he taught in the school of Pferou, where he had his first, fruitful pedagogical experiences, and became aware of his vocation as an educator. He then always maintained a fervent correspondence with the best-known pedagogists of his time, and particularly with Alsted and Andreä, whose works aroused in him a lively impulse to reflection. From 1618 to 1621 he devoted himself to various studies at Fulnek in Moravia and there he married. From there, in 1621, he had to flee because of Ferdinand II's persecution of the "Bohemian Brethren" and went to Bohemia. Europe was then afflicted by the Thirty Years' War, and he had the sorrow of seeing his library destroyed and his manuscripts scattered, while grave family misfortunes struck him: the death of his wife and of two children. In 1624 he married again.
Following an imperial edict of proscription, he had to leave Bohemia in 1628 and went to Leszno (Lissa) in Poland, where the sorrows of exile and family misfortunes favored strange deviations of his spirit: he gave credence to exalted persons who declared themselves prophets and who announced the liberation of his homeland. Meanwhile he did not neglect his pedagogical studies: he sought advice from Ratke and Andreä on didactic questions, and studied the works of the major pedagogists of his time. Meanwhile he conceived a great work that would aid the learning of language through the intuition of things, and indeed published, in 1631, the Ianua linguarum reserata, while elaborating the ideas that would later inform his didactics.
In the preface to this work he acknowledges that he had been preceded by the Jesuits, with a book of similar content and title: Quia Patres isti tale hoc totius linguae compendium primi tentarunt, quod inventum est grate agnoscimus, quod erratum condonamus benigne. He says he knows this work in various editions, a German one in eight languages from 1629. The work is by the Irish Jesuit Father William Bathe, published anonymously in its first edition: Ianua linguarum, seu modus maxime accommodatus, quo patefit aditus ad omnes linguas intelligendas, industria Patrum hibernorum Societatis Iesu... edita (Salamanca 1611; v. Sommervogel, I, 1009). In the meantime he takes part in the pansophic movement and in the naturalistic currents that were maturing in Europe. In 1633 he publishes the Ianuae linguarum reseratae vestibulum and is elected "senior" of his community. Since political events were taking from him the last hopes of returning to his homeland, he went to England, where he composed the Via Crucis, dominated by the idea — at times naively expressed, but deeply cherished and felt — of a spiritual brotherhood of men, under the inspiration of God, in a pietistic, mystically tinged sense. And since his fame as a pedagogue was by now quite widespread, he was asked for advice by France, by Holland, by Sweden, even by America. From Sweden he received the task of preparing texts to improve teaching in the schools. Indeed in 1647 he published the Linguarum methodus novissima and other texts for the teaching of Latin. Having then returned to Lissa, he was struck in 1648 by another grave domestic bereavement, the death of his second wife. In the same year, with the Thirty Years' War over, he hoped to return to his homeland, but the exiles belonging to religious sects were not granted the right to return, and so C. remained an exile.
The prince of Transylvania Sigismund Rakoczy invited him to Saros Patak, where the direction of a pansophic school was entrusted to him, and it is from this period that the completion of the work Orbis rerum sensualium pictus dates, strongly inspired by the new intuitive method.
Invited later to Amsterdam, he spent his last years there, and there he wrote the Ventilabrum sapientiae, in which, with a modesty equal to the sincere passion that animated his whole life, he brought to light the errors and deficiencies of his works. From this period dates the Traditio lampadus, in which he recommends, in the vision of how much still remained to be done to improve humanity, the continuation of his work. He worked intensely until his last days, publishing for the first time his major work, the Didactica magna.
THE THOUGHT
His thought, because of the encyclopedic multitude of his works, because of its sometimes naive and not always clear form, because of the somewhat visionary tendencies of his spirit, may seem bound to outdated traditions, but it is in reality attentive to contemporary scientific and philosophical currents, and strongly dominated by one great idea: the reform of humanity, through a rational culture, conformable to human nature.
The human soul has the power to comprehend everything; it has an insatiable thirst for knowledge that reveals its destiny and its otherworldly end. There is a wondrous capacity in man to draw wisdom from himself, by the impulse of his nature so richly endowed by God, because «within man there truly is everything: there is the lamp, the light and the oil, the wick and all that is necessary»; he must be helped to kindle the flame. And it is the duty of those who govern to order the schools to this end. Education gives nothing to the conscience from outside, but helps it to kindle the inner light that must allow it to see in itself and in the great world of nature the wonderful treasures of God's wisdom.
Bacon's scientific naturalism passes, through C.'s work, into the modern pedagogical approach, into didactic methods, and joins in a suggestive way with a profound religious vision of life, of the purpose assigned to it by God, with a hope of pacification and fraternity among men, finally united in the clear awareness of their origin and their common end. C.'s three major works are: the Ianua, the Orbis and the Didactica. All of them brought into the school the broad contribution of the modern scientific spirit and inspired naturalistic pedagogy and the active school. Rousseau and Pestalozzi find in him their great precursor. No less than Pestalozzi, he has faith in education, a profoundly humanitarian spirit, the cult of the human personality. He differs from Rousseau and Pestalozzi in that he acknowledges man's decline through original sin, but he lacks, as Rousseau and Pestalozzi lack, the Catholic concept of Grace that raises fallen nature and helps it to reach perfection. Therefore C. erroneously holds that man has within himself the strength and the adequate means to raise himself and reach perfection, even though he generically admits that such strength comes from God, but as author of nature, not as Redeemer and author of Grace.
The first two works, the Ianua and the Orbis, bring out the relationship between word and thought, and admonish education about the uselessness of any language teaching founded on memory and not on the development of thought and on real intuitions. Teaching must therefore be intuitive, and for this reason C. gives us in the Orbis pictus a first example of an illustrated book for children, in the sense that the learning of words must always be joined to that of things, and in the sense that every cognition must begin from the senses, in order then to pass, according to the law of gradation, to the intellect.
C.'s most extensive work is the Didactica magna, Universale omnes omnia docendi artificium exhibens, where, amid prolixity, repetitions and sometimes pedestrian exemplification, there dominate a living thought and a vigilant care to render systematic the pedagogical principles and the educational practice. In this work are expressed the principles on which C. founds education, and a plan of studies that he proposes to rulers as necessary in a well-ordered State.
Education must be universal; all must be educated, because only education can bring nature to the fullness of earthly life, in order to turn it to its ultimate end, which is otherworldly: the full possession of God. One must not fear, according to the prejudices of the age, to instruct the people and women. And instruction must embrace everything; the plan of studies proposed by C. is vast: «everything to everyone», he wishes to repeat. He therefore wants the organization of the school according to various grades corresponding to the grades of human development, with a method of «cyclical teaching». For the first time a «school of the mother's womb» is introduced, which must be in every home through the mother's work; likewise among the first he proposes a «school of the national language», which precedes the «Latin school», and which he wants extended to all. The cycle of studies is then completed with the «Academy». The Latin school must be accessible to young people between the ages of 12 and 18, who can and wish to devote themselves to classical studies. Such a school must be in every city, while the Academy, which must receive young people between the ages of 18 and 24, must be in every State and in every province.
«Everything to everyone» implies the cyclical method, in the sense that the functions of the spirit are all exercised in every grade of school. In his «everything to everyone» there is also revealed his pansophic, encyclopedic ideal, which he shared with his age and which he expresses with naive enthusiasm.
The education of the senses and of the intellect must tend toward that of the will, as a harmonizing force of all the faculties.
In the enumeration of didactic rules, in the frequent and sometimes pedestrian comparisons between the education of man and the development of natural things, lies the negative and outdated aspect of C.'s pedagogical thought, which seems to want to form the spirit from outside.