EDUCATIONAL REVIEW

MARCH, 1892

I.

JOHN AMOS COMENIUS.

Mr. Quick used to say that the rapid advance of the fame of Comenius in the last thirty years is one of the most hopeful signs of the improvement of education. That this advance has been great is shown by the fact that the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Comenius, a name not long ago totally unfamiliar to any save the student of the history of education, is now being celebrated in Germany, in Great Britain, and in America. He has come to be recognized as the man who first infused into education the spirit and methods of a slowly developing modern science. On the foundation laid by him the superstructure of Pestalozzi and Froebel was built.

America was one hundred years old when Comenius was born, but the wilderness of the New World was unbroken. Neither at Jamestown nor at Plymouth had a permanent settlement been established. The Spanish Armada had just been defeated, and the future of Great Britain made secure. Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, and Hooker were making Elizabethan literature. Francis Bacon was growing in power and reputation, but the climax of his career was yet to come. Copernicus had done his work; but Galileo, Kepler, and Harvey were still young men. Montaigne was dying, and Giordano Bruno was soon to be led to the stake. Luther had finished his fight, and the shock of the contest was felt in every corner of Europe. The universities were growing in numbers and influence; but Descartes and Newton, with the secrets of modern philosophy and modern science locked in their breasts, were yet unborn. It was an age of growth, of

development, of rapid progress. But the education of the people, true to its conservative traditions, was still shackled. Sturm, the typical schoolmaster of partisan humanism, had endeavored to escape the unsatisfactory present by anchoring the school to the newly-found past. Rabelais and Montaigne had scoffed and ridiculed in vain. Something more systematic and constructive than mere literary criticism of the extravagances of humanism was necessary if education was to be in touch with the time. The impetus to this constructive work, and many far-reaching suggestions concerning it, were given by Comenius.

Comenius, who like Plato bears a name not his own, was the son of a miller named Komensky, and first saw the light at a little Moravian village called Nivnitz on March 28, 1592. His father was a member of that remarkable unitas fratrum that has survived all vicissitudes and exists to-day as the Moravian Church. Of that Church the son became chief bishop, and by it his name is cherished with affection and reverence.

He began to write at an early age, after an education not only belated but insufficient. His inspiration from the first was the thought of benefiting his fellow-men by devising a more easy method of approach to learning; and he derived both suggestion and assistance from the method of Ratke, which the universities were then seriously investigating. How his efforts took the form of a text-book, or a series of editions of a text-book, is fully described below by Mr. Bardeen.

Living as he did during the Thirty Years' War, an undisturbed residence in any portion of Western Europe was hardly possible for one so prominent and so aggressive as Comenius. In the religious persecutions of the time, as Michelet puts it, he lost his country and found the world. His reputation increased with every book he wrote. His Janua was translated into nearly a score of languages, including Turkish, Arabic, and Persian. Through the influence of Hartlib, the friend of Milton, Comenius was invited by Parliament to visit England, but the civil war rendered his trip of no avail. From leading men in France and Holland, and from Oxen

stiern, the great chancellor of Sweden, came pressing invitations to Comenius to visit them, and expound his proposals for the reform and extension of education. Cotton Mather asserts in his Magnalia that "our Mr. Winthrop in his travels " invited Comenius to come to Harvard College as its president, but that he went to Sweden instead. Mr. Hanus refers to this statement in detail below.

After a life of restless wandering and no little suffering and privation, Comenius passed away in 1671 at Amsterdam, in his eightieth year.

The papers by Mr. Laurie and Mr. Hanus that follow go at some length into the permanent services to education rendered by Comenius. They may, perhaps, be summarized thus: he inf sisted that education is a natural, not an artificial process, and should therefore follow in its methods the analogy of growth and development in nature; that the mother-tongue must be brought into the schools as a subject of instruction, and that Latin be made subordinate to it; that language teaching be by a natural method, not divorcing words from things nor wasting time over grammatical subtleties; that, since the material of knowledge is derived through the senses, sense-training is fundamental; that geography and history should be made school subjects; that young children should be given a special training, anticipating much of Froebel's Kindergarten system; that knowledge must be fitted to action, and education adapted to life; and finally that education is for all and not for a limited number or a favored class. In our day these positions are commonplaces. But such is their value, that we do well to pause to honor the memory of him who first made them so. THE EDITORS.

II.

THE PLACE OF COMENIUS IN THE HISTORY OF

EDUCATION.

In March, 1892, three hundred years will have elapsed since Comenius was born. The whole educational world is alive to the fact, and in Germany and America the day is being

widely celebrated, although forty years ago the name of Comenius was known only to a historical student here and there, and that chiefly associated with an illustrated schoolbook, the Orbis Pictus.

It is not universally true that writers of genuine original vein suffer neglect during their lifetime. Much depends on the position of authority which they may hold, or on their power of fitting their fresh thought to the forms of expression current in their time. It cannot be said that Comenius failed to interest his contemporaries, but he was scarcely dead when his reputation died also. That in him which was specially origi nal fell into utter oblivion. Bayle in his Dictionary (1695) speaks of him in a depreciating way, though allowing that the Janua is an immortal schoolbook; and, nearly a hundred years afterward, Adelung, in his History of Human Folly, describes him as a man of weak and limited mind and as little more than a charlatan. No doubt much of this neglect of the old Bishop was due to the fact that his ecclesiastical and pansophic writings were of only passing interest, and that his chief claim to permanent regard as an intellectual force lay in his contributions to the education of the young. Even in our own day, a man who writes on education is regarded by historians and men of letters as to some extent a trifler or a fanatic. The mere fact that he occupies himself with the education of the child-mind seems to stamp him as something of a child himself. If Milton, the contemporary of Comenius, had written nothing but his essay on Education, he would have been long since forgotten, or at most known only to a few antiquaries, notwithstanding the literary excellence of portions of the Tractate. Roger Ascham has seldom been assigned his fit place as a former of English prose; and this, because he wrote on education; even many men of letters, whose business is the history of English literature, have not, I find, read his Scholemaster. In like manner classical experts know wonderfully little of Quintilian. Mulcaster's Positions has met a similar fate. And yet it is beyond all question that had the subject on which these men wrote been

the political backstairs gossip of Mémoires pour servir, or tracings on monumental stones, or even the ways of beetles, their importance as mere men of letters and as contributors to the enrichment of the substance, and refiners of the form, of the English language, would have been kept constantly in the eye of the English-speaking literary public.

It has also to be noted that to write anything having the aspect of novelty on education and schools, is to attack a large and powerful class and to insure their hostility. This helps to consign the writers to oblivion. Even the venerable Comenius, when his life-work was approaching its close, was assailed at Amsterdam as an arch-enemy of schools and schoolmasters and had to make a pathetic defense.

To resent criticism of an institution as if it were a personal attack on its administrators, is not confined to the teaching profession, but it certainly has been a more active characteristic of schoolmasters than of clergymen, lawyers, or physicians. Teachers do not wish to be disturbed by new ideas. Even Milton, between whom and Comenius there was a fundamental sympathy of aim and a common hatred of the traditional methods, yet just because he was himself a schoolmaster, suffers from this narrow pedagogic spirit, and declines in his letter to Hartlib to have anything to do with new-fangled notions. "To search what many modern Januas and Didactics, more than ever I shall read, have projected, my inclination leads me not." It is true that he also says, "What I have benefited herein. among old renowned authors, I shall spare." Who the "renowned authors" may have been, however, he does not say; nor do his treatises give any indication that he ever read any of them, although we may, perhaps, not err in presuming that Quintilian, at least, was not unknown to him. Doubtless this peculiar attitude of the scholastic mind is largely due to the position of authority in which teachers are placed when yet young and unformed. They succeed to a certain traditional way of doing things; a few years' practice habituates them to it, and this habit combines with the almost despotic position in which they are placed to produce a conviction of finality.