Comenius' School of Infancy/Introduction
INTRODUCTION.
Comenius believed that education would regenerate the race; accordingly all children, rich and poor, high and low, boys and girls, were to be educated. Instruction must begin in early youth and follow the course of nature. For this purpose, he outlined an ideal scheme which extended from the birth of the child to the age of twenty-four years. This system of education provides for four grades of schools: 1. The Mother school, which shall cover the first six years of the child’s life, laying the foundation for all that he is to learn in the later life. He is to be given simple lessons in objects, taught to know stones, plants, and animals; the names and uses of the members of his body; to distinguish light and darkness and colors; the geography of the cradle, the room, the farm, the street, and the field; trained in moderation, purity, and obedience, and taught to say the Lord’s prayer. In the first school the mother is to be the teacher. 2. The Primary school, which is to occupy the years from six to twelve; this is peculiarly a school of the mother tongue. Here the child is to be taught “to read; to write well; to reckon as far as ordinary life will require; to measure; to sing common melodies by rote; the catechism; the Bible; a very general knowledge of history, especially of the creation, the fall of man and the redemption; a beginning of cosmography, and a knowledge of trades and occupations.” 3. The Latin school, occupying the years from twelve to eighteen, during which time Latin, Greek, and Hebrew shall be taught. Physics must be studied before abstract mathematics, because addressed to the sense, and therefore easier for beginners. Ethics, dialectics, and rhetoric are also included in the course of study for the Latin school. 4. The University, where every department of knowledge shall be taught by men learned each in his own department. “The learned men shall bind themselves to use their united powers to promote the sciences and to make new discoveries.” How far these elaborate schemes have been realized, may be seen by comparing the plans of Comenius with the public school systems in our own country and Germany.
It was as a guide to mothers during the years of opening intelligence that Comenius wrote the School of Infancy; but one finds in this quaint old book not only a guide for mothers, but as well for teachers and all others engaged in the high and holy mission of training little ones. Comenius loved children. His faith in the possibility of training the young into useful men and women was bounded only by the blue dome of heaven. What higher tribute to childhood than this paragraph: “Whoever has within his house youth exercising themselves in piety, morality, and knowledge, possesses a garden in which celestial plantlets are sown, watered, bloom, and flourish; a studio, as it were, of the Holy Spirit in which he elaborates and polishes these vessels of mercy, these instruments of glory, so that in them, as living images of God, the rays of his eternal and infinite power, wisdom, and bounty may shine more and more. How inexpressibly blessed are such parents!”
The School of Infancy was written between 1628 and 1630, during the time that Comenius was pastor of the Moravian church and teacher in the Brethren’s school at Lissa, Poland. It was written in the Bohemian language, translated into German, and first printed in 1633 at Lissa. The year following an edition appeared in Leipzig, and two years later a third German edition was printed at Nuremburg. Subsequently Polish, Bohemian, and Latin translations appeared; and Joseph Müller of Herrnhut, Germany, in a very accurate and complete bibliography (61)[2] of the writings of Comenius, mentions an English edition of 1641. I have found no other reference to an English translation so early. Comenius was well known in England to Milton, Hartlib, and others high in authority; and the fact that most of his other writings were early translated into English, gives credence to Mr. Müller’s statement. In 1858, Daniel Benham published in London an English translation (23) of the School of Infancy, to which was prefixed an extended and well written account of the life of Comenius. Benham’s translation has long been out of print, and this excellent book, in consequence, inaccessible to the English reader.
In America, where teachers are beginning to study the literature of their calling, the book has been in demand for several years; and the present edition has been prepared with the hope that it may, in some measure, meet this growing demand, and, at the same time, add to the awakened interest in educational classics. In the present edition, Benham’s translation has been to some extent followed, the editor, however, making frequent translations from the German editions (Leipzig, 1875 and 1891) by Julius Beeger and Albert Richter. The frontispiece portrait of Comenius is from an engraving by W. Hollar, the Bohemian artist, who doubtless took it from life.
The footnotes by the editor show to some extent the origin of Comenius’ educational ideals and the influence of his writings on later educators. Mr. Quick (67) is entirely right in declaring that Comenius was the first to treat education in a scientific spirit. Monsieur Compayré (127) says: “He determined, nearly three hundred years ago, with an exactness that leaves nothing to be desired, the division of the different grades of instruction. He exactly defined some of the laws of the art of teaching, and he applied to pedagogy, with remarkable insight, the principles of modern logic.”
There are in English so many excellent accounts of the life of Comenius that a biographical sketch in this connection seems unnecessary. The life by Laurie (48) and the sketches in Barnard’s American Journal of Education (2), Compayré’s History of Pedagogy (28), and Quick’s Educational Reformers (67) are commended to the reader. The editor has also appended a bibliography of the Comenian literature to which he has had access. Monatshefte der Comenius-Gesellschaft (54), a monthly magazine published at Leipzig, now on its fourth volume, will be found a mine of rich Comenian lore.
Famous in his own day; enjoying the friendship of the great scholars and the confidence of royal personages; the author of one hundred and thirty-five educational and religious books and treatises which were translated during his lifetime into all the languages of Europe and most of the Asiatic languages; bishop of the Moravian church,—Comenius and his writings were forgotten, and his name practically unknown, for two hundred years. Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler (13), in likening him unto the stream that loses itself in the arid desert and then reappears with gathered force and volume to lend its fertilizing power to the surrounding country, says: “Human history is rich in analogies to this natural phenomenon, but in Comenius the history of education furnishes its example. The great educational revival of our century, and particularly of our generation, has shed the bright light of scholarly investigation into all the dark places, and to-day, at the three hundredth anniversary of his birth, the fine old Moravian bishop is being honored wherever teachers gather together, and wherever education is the theme.”
Banished from his native Bohemia in early life by religious fanatics, he passed all his years in exile: now a teacher in Poland; now writer of pedagogical treatises for the educational department of Sweden; now adviser to the English parliament on educational topics; and now superintendent of schools in Transylvania (Hungary). Whether he taught in twenty cities, as Michelet maintains, and whether he was called to the presidency of Harvard College, as Cotton Mather asserts (but which the editor seriously doubts), does not concern the limits of this introduction. But that he was a great man in his own day, “a noble priest of humanity,” as Herder so aptly characterizes him, no one familiar with the history of pedagogy in the seventeenth century will for a moment gainsay. He had the ears of kings and princes in nearly every country in Europe; his books were translated into Latin, Greek, Bohemian, Polish, Swedish, Dutch, English, Spanish, Italian, French, Hungarian, and the Asiatic languages of Turkey, Arabia, and Persia; the governments of England, France, Hungary, Holland, and Sweden all invited him to come and live among them, and reconstruct their educational systems.
On the two hundredth anniversary of his death there was founded at Leipzig a national pedagogical library in his memory which now numbers over sixty-six thousand volumes. Besides the review (Monatshefte der Comenius Gesellschaft) already noted, there are in many German cities Comenian societies which have for their object the study of his educational theories and practices. On the 28th of March, 1892, the three hundredth anniversary of his birth, educators the world over met to honor his memory and reflect upon the vast significance of his life and teachings. At the same time there was erected at Naärden, Holland, a modest but appropriate monument. It stands in a little park that is tastefully ornamented with shrubs and flowers, and consists of a pyramid of rough stones, with two marble slabs containing beautiful gold furrowed inscriptions in Latin, Dutch, and Slavonic. Here in this quiet little Dutch town, where he passed his closing days in exile, hundreds of educators come annually from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Poland, Sweden, and other European countries to pay willing homage to the memory of a great teacher and a good man. That an American edition of his School of Infancy may do something towards contributing to this interest, is the sincere hope of the editor.
- ↑ The Great Didactic was Comenius’ most considerable work on the philosophy of education. An English translation by Professor Hanus will shortly appear in the international educational series edited by Dr. Harris.
- ↑ The numerals in the Introduction refer to the bibliography at the close of the volume.