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 < back to authors list John Amos Comenius:
Born in Moravia in 1592, Comenius studied at Herborn and Heidelburg and became rector of the Moravian school of Prerau in 1614. A bronze statue of Comenius stands on Moravian's campus today. He fled to Poland at the beginning of the 30 Years' War settling in Lissa in 1968. He became Bishop of the Moravian Brethren in 1632. In 1650 he went to Hungary where he wrote Orbis Pictus, or "The World Illustrated," in 1968, the first picture book for children. It became a bestseller, translated into every major European language and used by beginning learners for more than 100 years. He also wrote Janua Linguarum Reserata, "The Gate of Languages Unlocked", published in 1631, a beginning Latin textbook. These books were the educational reformers of their time. His ideas on education changed the way children were taught and their lasting effects can still be felt today. He wrote about the importance of education for everyone, career preparation, financial aid, extracurricular activities, and even Cliff's Notes: "Geographers and mapmakers present to the eye huge tracts of sea and land on a small scale, so that they can be taken in at a glance. Why, therefore, should not Cicero, Livy, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Tacitus etc., be treated in the same way and epitomized?," Comenius wrote in Didactic. "These epitomes should contain the whole author, only somewhat reduced in bulk." He came up with a concept he called pansophy: "men, seeing in a clear light the ends of all things, and the means to those ends, and the correct use of those means, might be able to direct all that they have to good ends. (Via Lucia XVI.5)" This became his purpose in life, to make men see this was the way to live. His concept didn't receive much recognition until 1633 with the publication of Janua, when a group of social reformers encouraged him to develop his idea of universal wisdom, or pansophy. He did this in a series of works called General Consultation concerning the Improvement of Human Affairs (the Consultation), which was published in small parts in 1657 and 1662. Most people weren't very enthusiastic about his ideas, and they weren't universally recognized mostly because his vision for a better future for his country hadn't materialized. Comenius worked on more than 500 books in his lifetime. His most famous books are Janua Linguarum Reserata or The Gate of Languages Unlocked, published in 1631, Orbis Pictus or The World Illustrated, published in 1658, and Didactica Magna or The Great Didactic, published in 1649. He also wrote: General Consultation Concerning the Improvement of Human Affairs, The School of Infancy, The Theatre of the Universe and Collected Works. Comenius' early years in school, where strict discipline and beatings were the rule, brought forth his beliefs that students' lack of progress was to be blamed more on the inefficiency of teachers than on the idleness of students. "The proper education of the young does not consist in stuffing their heads with a mass of words, sentences, and ideas dragged together out of various authors," Comenius said in Didactic, "but in opening up their understanding to the outer world, so that a living stream may flow from their own minds, just as leaves, flowers, and fruit spring from the bud on a tree." He devoted his life to devising new methods of instruction and better ways to study that would encourage learning. Believing that the best teacher in the early years is the mother, Comenius wrote Informatory of the Mother Schoo,l a handbook that told parents what was required of them and how to meet those requirements. He also wrote six class books, never published: Violet-bed of the Christian Youth, Rose-bed of the Christian Youth, The Garden of Letters and Wisdom, Labryinth of Wisdom, Spiritual Balsam-bed of the Christian Youth and Paradise of the Soul. Each class book was age-appropriate, intending with the first to attract children to schoolwork and ending up with a student who can find his way in the world. Comenius' ideas weren't very popular in the 1600s, but more than 200 years later, when copies of his manuscripts stashed in a library orphanage were discovered by educators, his ideas were reborn. During the early nineteenth century, idealism of the French Revolution, the industrial revolution and other factors brought Comenius' ideas alive again. Several educationalists called him "the real founder of the science of education." When the first detailed biography of Comenius was published in 1829, a new interest in his works fueled a search for his lost manuscripts: the Czech version of The Great Didactic was found at Leszno, where Comenius buried his manuscripts, in 1841. It was at this time that Comenius became widely accepted as laying the foundations for the science of education. Several books were written about his ideas during the nineteenth century, and in 1868, Comenius was honored in Educational Reformers of 1868 by R.H. Quick. By the twentieth century, Comenius' ideas were at the forefront of educational reform. The Foreword to Collected Works, published in Czechoslovakia in the 1950's, said: "After three centuries there arise the conditions that will make possible the realization of even his most daring schemes. The socialist society realizes the unified school system from primary school up to the highest standard as Comenious proposed: in the socialist society all children are given a general education without any discrimination of sex, social origin or property."
— reported by Kim Pawlak, 1998
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