John Amos Comenius
John Amos Comenius was a Czech philosopher, pedagogue and theologian who is considered the father of modern education. He served as the last bishop of the Unity of the Brethren before becoming a religious refugee and one of the earliest champions of universal education, a concept eventually set forth in his book Didactica Magna. As an educator and theologian, he led schools and advised governments across Protestant Europe through the middle of the seventeenth century.
Comenius introduced a number of educational concepts and innovations including pictorial textbooks written in native languages instead of Latin, teaching based in gradual development from simple to more comprehensive concepts, lifelong learning with a focus on logical thinking over dull memorization, equal opportunity for impoverished children, education for women, and universal and practical instruction. He also believed heavily in the connection between nature, religion, and knowledge, in which he stated that knowledge is born from nature and nature from God.
A proud Moravian, he nevertheless for most of his life – mainly due to the difficult wartime circumstances in the homeland and fear from religious persecution – lived and worked as an exile in various regions of the Holy Roman Empire and other countries: Sweden, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Transylvania, England, the Netherlands and Hungary. He turned down an offer to immigrate to the New England Colonies and take up the presidency of the newly founded Harvard University.
Life and work
John Amos Comenius was born in 1592 in the Margraviate of Moravia in the Bohemian Crown. His exact birthplace is uncertain and possibilities include Uherský Brod, Nivnice, and Komňa, all these localities being situated in the Uherské Hradiště District of today's Czech Republic. John was the youngest child and only son of Martin Komenský and his wife Anna Chmelová. His grandfather, whose name was Jan Szeges, was of Hungarian origin. He began to use the surname Komenský after leaving Komňa to live in Uherský Brod. Martin and Anna Komenský belonged to the Bohemian Brethren, a pre-Reformation Protestant denomination, and Comenius later became one of its leaders. His parents and two of his four sisters died in 1604 and John, still a child, went to live with his aunt in Strážnice.Owing to his impoverished circumstances he was unable to begin his formal education until his later teens. He was 16 when he entered the Latin school in Přerov, returning there later as a teacher 1614–1618. He continued his studies at the Herborn Academy and at the University of Heidelberg. In 1612 he read the Rosicrucian manifesto Fama Fraternitatis. Comenius was also greatly influenced by the Irish Jesuit William Bathe as well as by his teachers Johann Piscator, Heinrich Gutberleth, and particularly Heinrich Alsted. The Herborn Academy maintained the principle that every theory has to be functional in practical use, therefore it has to be didactic. In the course of his studies, Comenius also became acquainted with the educational reforms of Ratichius and with the report of these reforms issued by the universities of Jena and Giessen.
Comenius became rector of a school in Přerov. In 1616 he was ordained into the ministry of the Bohemian Brethren and four years later became pastor and rector at Fulnek, one of the denomination's most flourishing churches. Throughout his life this pastoral activity was his most immediate concern. In consequence of the religious wars, in 1621 he lost all his property, including his writings. In 1627 he led the Brethren into exile when the Habsburg Counter-Reformation persecuted the Protestants in Bohemia. In 1628 he corresponded with Johann Valentin Andreae.
He produced the book Janua linguarum reserata, or The Gate of Languages Unlocked, which brought him to prominence. However, as the Unity became an important target of the Counter Reformation politics, he was forced into exile even as his fame grew across Europe. Comenius took refuge in Leszno in Poland, where he was head of the gymnasium school and was furthermore given charge of the Bohemian and Moravian churches.
In 1638 Comenius responded to a request by the government of Sweden and traveled there to draw up a scheme for the management of that country's schools.
After his religious duties, Comenius's second great interest was in furthering the Baconian attempt at the organization of all human knowledge. He became one of the leaders in the encyclopaedia or pansophic movement of the seventeenth century, and, in fact, was inclined to sacrifice his more practical educational interests and opportunities for these more imposing but somewhat visionary projects. In 1639, Comenius published his Pansophiae Prodromus, and in the following year his English friend Samuel Hartlib published, without his consent, the plan of the pansophic work as outlined by Comenius. These pansophic ideas find partial expression in the textbooks he produced from time to time. In these, he attempts to organize the entire field of human knowledge so as to bring it, in outline, within the grasp of every child. Comenius also attempted to design a language in which false statements could not be expressed.
In 1641, Comenius responded to a request from the English Long Parliament and joined a commission there established to reform the system of public education. The English Civil War interfered with the latter project. According to Cotton Mather, Comenius was asked by Winthrop to be the President of Harvard University. The Winthrop in question was more plausibly John Winthrop the Younger than his father, since Winthrop junior was in England. However, instead Comenius moved in 1642 to Sweden. to work with Queen Christina and the chancellor Axel Oxenstierna at the task of reorganizing the Swedish schools. The same year he then moved to Elbląg in Poland and in 1648 to England, this time with the assistance of Samuel Hartlib, who came originally from Elbląg. In 1650 Zsuzsanna Lorántffy, widow of George I Rákóczi Prince of Transylvania invited Comenius to Sárospatak. There he remained as a professor at the first Hungarian Protestant College until 1654, writing some of his most important works in this period.
Comenius subsequently returned to Leszno. During the Deluge in 1655, he declared his support for the Protestant Swedish side, prompting Polish Catholic partisans in 1656 to burn his house, his manuscripts, and the school's printing press. The manuscript of Pansophia was destroyed in the fire. From Leszno he fled to take refuge in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He lived in the Huis met de Hoofden and taught his grandson Johann Theodor Jablonski as well as the young patricians Pieter de Graeff and Nicolaas Witsen.
In 1659, Comenius produced a new edition of the 1618 Bohemian Brethren hymnal, Kancionál, to jest kniha žalmů a písní duchovních containing 606 texts and 406 melodies. In addition to addressing the psalms and hymns, his revision greatly expanded the number of hymns and added a new introduction. This edition was reissued several times into the nineteenth century. His texts in Czech were notable poetic compositions, but he used tunes from other sources. He also edited the German hymnal Kirchen-, Haus- und Hertzens-Musica, which had been published under the title Kirchengesänge since 1566. In other writings, Comenius addresses both instrumental and vocal music in many places, although he dedicated no treatise to the topic. Sometimes he follows the medieval mathematical conception of music, but in other places he links music with grammar, rhetoric, and politics. Musical practice, both instrumental and vocal, played an important role in his system of education.
It was in Amsterdam that Comenius would die, in 1670. For unknown reasons he was buried in Naarden, where visitors can see his grave in the mausoleum, located in the Kloosterstraat, devoted to him. Next to the mausoleum is the Comenius Museum.
Educational influence
For the greater part of the eighteenth century and early part of the nineteenth, there was little recognition of his relationship to the advance in educational thought and practice. However, the importance of the Comenian influence in education has been recognized since the middle of the nineteenth century. The practical educational influence of Comenius was threefold.He was first a teacher and an organizer of schools, not only among his own people, but later in Sweden, and to a slight extent in Holland. In his Didactica Magna, he outlined a system of schools that is the exact counterpart of the existing American system of kindergarten, elementary school, secondary school, college, and university.
The second influence was in formulating the general theory of education. In this respect, he is the forerunner of Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Fröbel, etc., and is the first to formulate the idea of "education according to nature," which became consequential during the latter part of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth century. The influence of Comenius on education is comparable with that of his contemporaries, Bacon and Descartes, on science and philosophy. In fact, he was largely influenced by the works of these two men. This comparison is largely due to the fact that he first applied or attempted to apply in a systematic manner the principles of thought and investigation, newly formulated by those philosophers, to the organization of education in all its aspects. The summary of this attempt is given in the Didactica Magna, completed about 1631, though not published until several years later.
The third aspect of influence was on the subject matter and method of education, exerted through a series of textbooks of an entirely new nature. The first-published of these was the Janua Linguarum Reserata, issued in 1631. This was followed by a more elementary text, the Vestibulum, a more advanced one, the Atrium, and others. The Orbis Pictus, published in 1658, became one of the most renowned and widely circulated school books over the next century. It was also the first successful application of illustrations to the work of teaching youth.
The educational writings of Comenius comprise more than forty titles. These texts were all based on the same fundamental ideas: learning foreign languages through the vernacular; obtaining ideas through objects rather than words; starting with objects most familiar to the child to introduce him to both the new language and the more remote world of objects; giving the child a comprehensive knowledge of his environment, physical and social, as well as instruction in religious, moral, and classical subjects; making this acquisition of a compendium of knowledge a pleasure rather than a task; and making instruction universal "to all men and from all points of view".