Didática Magna

Jan Amos Comenius - Jean Piaget

First Published in: Prospects (UNESCO, International Bureau of Education), vol. XXIII, no. 1/2, 1993, p. 173-96.

©UNESCO: International Bureau of Education, 1999

Nothing is easier, or more dangerous, than to treat an author of 300 years ago as modern and claim to find in him the origins of contemporary or recent trends of thought 1. A typical example of the difficulties this kind of interpretation meets with is the controversy about the significance of Francis Bacon’s work (and the example is of particular interest here, since Bacon, as we know, was one of Comenius’ sources of inspiration and was frequently quoted by him). Some authorities hold Bacon to be one of the precursors of modern experimental science; others find in his empiricism the whole residue of pre-scientific ways of thinking and emphasize how, as a theorist, he missed contact with the real science of his time, that of Galileo. Comenius could likewise be represented either as a precursor of evolutionary theory, genetic psychology, teaching methods based on child psychology, functional education and international education; or as a metaphysician who had no idea of the requirements of experimental psychological or even educational research, and who substituted the discussion of ideas for the analysis of facts. Yet all these extreme judgements would be incorrect.

The real problem is to find in Comenius’ writings—our knowledge of which has been so much enriched by the discoveries of the group now working at the Comenius Institute in Prague—not what is comparable with modern trends, to the neglect of the rest, but what makes the vital unity of the thinking of the great Czech specialist in theory and practice; and to compare this with what we know and want today. Either Comenius can have no immediate interest for us at the present time or his interest for us depends on that central core of thought which is to be found in any system and which it should be possible to express in the form of a few simple ideas. In the first part of this introduction, we shall therefore try to discover the dominant ideas in Comenius’ thinking; then, in the two succeeding parts, we shall seek to bring out the aspects of the great educationist’s work which are still important for us, in the light of these central ideas restated in terms accessible to us.

I

When we go through the mass of Comenius’ writings, however, it is extremely difficult to pick out the guiding ideas of the system, which is full of obscurities and, sometimes, apparent contradictions.

In the first place, how are we to account for the fact that a theologian enamoured of metaphysics and imbued with the speculative spirit of the seventeenth century should have concerned himself with education to the point of creating a ‘Great Didactic’? There were indeed many educational institutions in which certain special methods had been developed; and these had been described. Ratke and Alsted, for instance, were probably the first to draw Comenius’ attention to teaching problems, especially in the field of language instruction. But there was a long way to go before building up a whole philosophy of education and centring a still broader system around it. Thinkers and philosophers, from Montaigne and Rabelais to Descartes and Leibniz, had likewise made profound remarks about education, but only as corollaries to their main ideas. Not only was Comenius the first to conceive a full-scale science of education but, let it be repeated, he made it the very core of a ‘pansophy’ which, in his thinking, was to constitute a general philosophic system. How can we explain so original and unusual a statement of problems, in the middle of the seventeenth century?

The spirit in which Comenius sought to write the unfinished work known as the ‘General Consultation’ was the best proof that the art of teaching was intended to be the core of ‘pansophy’ itself; it also, incidentally, accounts for the failure of the enterprise. Instead of building up in the abstract that total, indivisible body of knowledge, that universal science that was to be pansophy—the doctrine of the progressive achievement of the ‘world of ideas’ within the superimposed worlds whose parallel strata form the universe—Comenius was forced, because he was pursuing a didactic as well as a philosophical aim (and this, by the way, is the most interesting aspect of the work), to make simplifications and assimilations which finally proved too much for him. He wished to construct his own system, but he also cherished the ambition of providing a kind of introduction to philosophy for all. Such an undertaking was unique in the seventeenth century. Hence the same problem: how are we to explain this merging of the need for a systematic basis for education with general philosophical speculation?

There is another difficulty. The foreword to The Great Didactic contrasts, with calm daring, the a priori method the author intends to follow with the empirical or a posteriori teaching experiments characteristic of the educational work of his predecessors.

We venture to promise a Great Didactic ... the whole art of teaching all things to all men, and indeed of teaching them with certainty, so that the result cannot fail to follow… Lastly, we wish to prove all this a priori, that is to say, from the unalterable nature of the matter itself … that we may lay the foundations of the universal art of founding universal schools. 2

But this promise of an a priori science of education, an ‘enormous’ undertaking, as Comenius himself admits, seems to come to nothing when we seek the basis for this science teaching, for example, and find that Comenius is content with the theory of sensation: ‘the truth  and certainty of science depend more on the witness of the senses than on anything else’, or ‘Science, then, increases in certainty in proportion as it depends on sensuous perception 3. There often seems to be some contradiction between the general principles the author proclaims and the quasi-sensualistic empiricism of so many of his formulae. Here again, it must therefore be assumed that there is an original connection between these somewhat irreconcilable statements, and that there is a synthesis linking man with nature so as to show why the educative process is the keystone of this philosophy.

But there is still more to the problem. Education, according to Comenius, is not merely the training of the child at school or in the home; it is a process affecting man’s whole life and the countless social adjustments he must make. Society as a whole is considered by Comenius sub specie educationis. The great principles of peace and the international organization of education that make him a forerunner of so many modern institutions and trends of thought likewise stem, in his work, from this unique synthesis between nature and man, which we have just suggested as the central element of his speculation and as the explanation of the mystery of an educationist’s philosophy in an age when education was a matter either of techniques unsupported by theory or of general observations without any attempt to constitute a science of teaching or education.

The key of these difficulties can be discovered only if we can find more complex basic concepts  in  Comenius’  philosophy  than  those  which  are  ordinarily  taken  as  sufficient—concepts whose very pattern is such as to make it possible to restate the central ideas of the system in modern terms. This explains the twofold impression of outmoded form and up-to- date substance which one continually receives when reading the great educationist’s works.

In this respect, Comenius’ metaphysics lies between scholasticism as inspired by Aristotle and the mechanicalism of the seventeenth century. Everyone can see the kinship between his philosophy and Bacons but, in respect of empiricism, this direct connection should not be overstressed; the main points to be kept in mind are the return to nature and the instauratio magna. The Aristotelian language used by Comenius is evident enough; but he constantly tends to replace the immobile hierarchy of forms by the concepts of advance and emergence, and by the idea of parallelism or harmony among the various kingdoms. In other words, he often sounds a neo-Platonic note, and Jan Patocka has quite rightly laid stress on this influence, and on that of Campanella. 4

This approach to the question does away with some of the difficulties and sheds an unexpected light on the main outlines of the work. The central idea is probably that of nature as a creator of forms, which, being reflected in the human mind, thanks to the parallelism between man and nature, makes the ordering of the educational process automatic. The natural order is the true principle of teaching, but the sequence is dynamic, and the educator can carry out his task only if he remains a tool in nature’s hands. Education is thus an integral part of the formative process to which all beings are subject and is only one aspect of that vast development. The descent or ‘procession’, in which the multiplication of beings consists, is matched by the upward motion at the level of human activity; and this upward motion, which will lead us to the Millennium, merges into one spontaneous development of nature and the educative process. Education is therefore not limited to the action of school and family but is part and parcel of general social life. Human society is an educational society: although this idea was not explicitly stated until the nineteenth century, Comenius’ philosophy gave him a glimpse of it. Hence the disconcerting ambition of the ‘pansophic’ conception—‘to teach all things to all men and from all points of view’—and the fundamental union between the educational ideal and the ideal of international organization.

We can thus gain an idea of how Comenius as a metaphysician, and Comenius at grips with the countless practical problems he encountered as a language teacher and organizer of schools, managed to achieve an inner unity, finding it in the elaboration of a philosophy based on education. Comenius’ genius lay in grasping the fact that education is one aspect of nature’s formative machinery and so integrating the educative process into a system in which this process is indeed the essential axis.

We can see at the same time how the proclamation, at the beginning of The Great Didactic, of an a priori science of education can be reconciled with the apparent sensualism of so many passages in that work. Comenius was not a sensualist, though, as we shall see, he possibly failed to make sufficient use of the parallelism between the ratio and the operatio to emphasize the active character of cognition. In his view, however, sensation creates knowledge in that it provides signals, as it were, that set off the spontaneous activity of the mind and link it up with the spontaneous activity that creates material things. Just as art imitates nature, according to the Aristotelian formula, so sensation (and this is a departure from the views of the peripatetics) makes it possible to re-establish the harmony between the active order of things, which teaches, and the spontaneity of the perceiving subject. 5

Finally, we can understand why Comenius became the apostle of international collaboration in education itself. No doubt the fratricidal struggles that constantly forced him into tragic exile and ruined his career both as theologian and as educator gave him reasons for his internationalist convictions, just as his experimental work as a teacher provided the starting-point for his thinking on education. But just as his thinking on that subject was integrated into a conception of the world where education proceeds from the formative action of nature, so his social and international ideas eventually became an integral part of his general doctrine of harmony and advance.

In short, Comenius’ system is internally consistent; and the main constituent links of that coherence, though not immediately apparent, account for the major educational principles, applying to social and international as well as to scholastic affairs, which the master continually expounded. Comenius’ significance for our time must therefore be sought by reference to the axes of his system; or, in other words, we must try to bring a modern point of view to bear upon the system as such, rather than upon mere individual aspects of it which, if isolated from their context, would give rise to arbitrary interpretations. Despite appearances, Comenius is really closer to us in his conception of man’s development as part and parcel of that of nature than in most of the special theses he defends in his Great Didactic.

II

Except in a few cases, the real difference between Comenius and us is the difference that lies between seventeenth- and twentieth-century ways of thinking. We no longer believe that metaphysics will enable us to understand the development of the child or of man in society, or the interaction between man and nature, to say nothing of the laws of nature. We have put a series of separate sciences in the place of simple speculation, and Comenius’ central ideas must be transposed into the context of the present day with due regard to this fundamental change in method. Such a transposition is quite legitimate; in the history of the sciences, ideas have often been presented philosophically before being built up scientifically into a more elaborate structure or subjected to systematic scientific checking. Atomistic concepts, those of conservation, etc., may be cited among countless possible examples.

Notwithstanding this difference in method, Comenius may undoubtedly be considered as one of the precursors of the genetic idea in developmental psychology, and as the founder of a system of progressive instruction adjusted to the stage of development the pupil has reached.

With regard to the first of these two points, Comenius has been interpreted either as a proponent of the theory of innate faculties—mental development being attributed to a mere maturation of preformed structures—or as an empiricist who considers the mind as a receptacle gradually filled by knowledge derived from sensation. This dual interpretation is, in itself, indicative of the author’s real position. Like all partisans of spontaneity and activity in the subject, he is accused sometimes of leaning towards preformisin and sometimes of exaggerating the part played by experience. Comenius’ concept of the parallelism of man and nature should be closely scrutinized in connection with this particular point. Such parallelism is open to the two objections mentioned above if it is conceived as static, but it is a doctrine of dynamism to the extent that it links together the formative order of the material world and that formative order, inherent in the subject’s actions, which, according to Comenius, represents both the law of development and the educative process itself.

With regard to the second point—application to teaching—Comenius works out all the implications of his belief in development. He distinguishes four types of schools for what we should now call the four major periods or stages in education: infancy, childhood, adolescence and youth. And, with really remarkable intuition, he grasps the fact that the same forms of knowledge are necessary at each of the different levels, because they correspond to permanent needs; and that the difference between these levels lies mainly in the way in which the forms of knowledge are re-outlined or restated. In a passage of The Great Didactic to which J. Piobetta rightly calls attention in the introduction to his French translation, Comenius presents the following proposition regarding these successive types of schools, which shows deep psychological understanding:

Though these schools be different, we do not wish them to teach different things, but rather the same things in a different manner. I mean, all things which can make men truly men, and the learned truly learned; they should be taught in consideration of the pupil’s age and the standard of his prior preparation, which should always tend gradually upward.

This is a very accurate anticipation of the successive reconstructions of the same kind of knowledge from stage to stage (e.g. from action to simple representation and thence to reflection), according to the system of consecutive development which modern genetic psychology bas enabled us to analyse.

More generally, in the sixth of the ‘Principles for Facilitating Teaching and Study’, Comenius derives from the idea of spontaneous development the following three rules, which might be written in letters of gold on the door of every modern school—so applicable are they still, and unfortunately so seldom applied:

1.  If the class instruction be curtailed as much as possible, namely to four hours, and if the same length of time be left for private study.

2.  If the pupil be forced to memorize as little as possible, that is to say, only the most important things; of the rest they need only grasp the general meaning.

3.  If everything be arranged to suit the capacity of the pupil, which increases naturally with study and age. 6

In other words, if the child is really a being in process of spontaneous development, then individual study, independent exercises, and the transformation of capacities with age are possible; the school should therefore take advantage of such possibilities instead of ignoring them on the assumption that ail education can be reduced to external, verbal and mnemonic transmission of adult knowledge through the teacher’s words to the pupil’s mind. True, in many other passages, Comenius seems to lay stress on receptivity. The role of images and sense data, the metaphor of the funnel into which knowledge is poured, and many other similar texts, appear to contradict these other statements. But if we bear in mind the idea of the parallel between formative nature and the training of man, it is impossible not to regard the above three rules as indicative of a recognition of the role of active development.

If we now go into the details of this theory of education based on spontaneous development, we are struck by the modern sound of a whole series of statements, despite the absence of a clear-cut theory of the relationship between action and thought.

To take this last point first, Comenius’ general theory involves a concept of parallelism or corresponding harmony rather than dependence between the cognitive functions or organs (mens, cerebrum, ratio) and activities themselves (manus, operatio, artes). But as soon as he comes to deal with teaching, he corrects his approach and steadily affirms the primacy of action:

Craftsmen do not hold their apprentices down to theories; they put them, to work without delay so that they may learn to forge metal by forging, to carve by carving, to paint by painting, to leap by leaping. Therefore in schools let the pupils learn to write by writing, to speak by speaking, to sing by singing, to reason by reasoning, etc., so that schools may simply be workshops in which work is done eagerly. Thus, by good practice, all will feel at last the truth of the proverb: Fabricando fabricamur. 7

Comenius goes as far as to defend this principle even in language teaching, stressing particularly that examples must precede rules: as the natural course of development consists in acting first and only afterwards reflecting on the circumstances of the action, examples cannot be deduced from a rule unless the rule is understood, but understanding of the rule derives from the retroactive organization of examples already utilized in spontaneous practice. 8

This principle of prior activity is interpreted by Comenius in the broadest sense, in accordance with his doctrine of spontaneity, as calling into play simultaneously needs and interests, or affective motivation, and functional practice as a source of knowledge. In other words, Comenius does not want exercises in a vacuum or mere breaking-in through action, but activity based on interest. P. Bovet 9, in this connection, quotes several remarkable passages. The first ones among them are interesting for their broad scope: ‘Do not undertake any teaching without first arousing the interest of the pupil’. And again: ‘Always offer something which will be both agreeable and useful; the pupils’ minds will thus be primed and they will come forward eagerly, with ever-ready attention." A third passage is interesting from the point of view of psychology. When a subject of teaching does not meet any clearly determined need, Comenius suggests recourse to the procedure of beginning something and then breaking off in order to create a gap—to start telling a tale or a little story, for instance, and break it off in the middle. What Comenius is using here is not exactly a need, but what the psychologist K. Lewin, who has studied the effect of such interrupted action, has called ‘quasi-needs’.

This functional character of the activity or spontaneity in which Comenius believes naturally leads him to take a clear stand with regard to the relationship between practical and formal methods. The question is discussed in an interesting way in connection with the second principle of the ‘Necessary Conditions for Teaching and Learning’, which is expressed as follows: ‘Nature prepares matter before giving it a form.’ After a few reflections upon the need for school equipment (books, pictures, specimens, models, etc.) before lessons begin, Comenius takes up the central question of the relations between speech and the knowledge of things. As a former teacher of Latin and other languages he pronounces this decisive verdict:

Languages are learned in schools before the sciences, since the intellect is detained for some years over the study of languages, and only then allowed to proceed to sciences, mathematics, physics, etc. And yet things are essential, words only accidental; things are the body, words but the garment; things are the kernel, words the shells and husk. Both should be prevented to the intellect at the same time, but [and the stress is mine] particularly the things, since they are as much objects of understanding as are languages. 10

In other words, behind the Aristotelian language of matter and form, or substance and accident, Comenius reverts to the progressive sequence of structure building; and, as a teacher, he is fully aware of the harm done by that enduring curse of education—verbalism or pseudo- knowledge (flatus vocis) associated with mere words, as distinct from the real knowledge created by the action of the pupil upon the objects of his study. Generally speaking, the terms of the second of the ‘Principles for Facilitating Teaching and Study’ are still more eloquent than those of the other second principle just mentioned: ‘Nature’, says Comenius, ‘prepares the material, before she begins to give it form 11.’ From the educational point of view, this amounts to saying that functionally acquired knowledge (‘in any event, young pupils must be imbued with the ardent desire to know and learn’) tends spontaneously to become organized; it can therefore be co-ordinated with logical and verbal structures wherever such co-ordination is based upon a sound, ‘form-desiring’ initial content. Formal instruction that precedes understanding of the content, on the other hand, leads us back to verbalism.

Two of these ‘Principles for Facilitating Teaching and Study’ deserve special mention because they emphasize what we should now call the genetic aspect, and the functional aspect, of Comenius’ ideas on educational psychology. Principle VII is stated as follows: ‘Nature imparts stimulus only to fully developed beings who wish to break out of their shell.’ Principle VIII: ‘Nature helps itself in every possible way.’ Comenius draws from these statements the following two corollaries which once again clearly assert the twofold need for education by degrees in accordance with the different stages of mental development and for a system of teaching that does not reverse the natural sequence of matter and form: ‘Now the faculties of the young are forced: (i) if boys are compelled to learn things for which their age and capacity are not yet suited; (ii) if they are made to learn by heart or do things that have not first been thoroughly explained and demonstrated to them.’ 12

But the statement which probably gives the clearest indication of the genetic trend in Comenius’ ideas on education is Principle I itself: ‘Nature awaits the favourable moment.’ After recalling that animals reproduce and plants grow according to the seasons, Comenius urges that the favourable moment for exercising the intelligence be seized upon, and that exercises ‘all be performed gradually following a fixed rule’. This is again tantamount to stressing what, in modern parlance, would be called the sequence of stages of development.

We all know, however, how misleading such principles may be with regard to the actual practice of teaching. How many schools invoke the ideas of development, interest, spontaneous activity, etc., though, in real fact, the only development is that laid down in the curriculum, the only interests are imposed, and the only activities suggested by adult authority! The true measure of active teaching (a form of education that is perhaps almost as rare today as in the seventeenth century) appears to, be the way in which truth is established. There is no authentic activity so long as the pupil accepts the truth of an assertion merely because it is conveyed from an adult to a child, with all the aura of explicit or implicit authority attached to the teachers words or those of the textbooks; but there is activity when the pupil rediscovers or reconstructs truth by means of external, or internal mental, action consisting in experiment or independent reasoning. This all-important fact appears to me to have been clearly grasped by Comenius. At the last school of which he was head, at Saros Patak in 1650, he was led to reduce his fundamental principles of teaching to three:

1 .  Proceed by stages (Omnia gradatim).

2.  Examine everything oneself, without submitting to authority [what Comenius called, in the etymological sense of the word, ‘autopsy’].

3.  Act on one’s own impulsion: ‘autopraxy’. This requires, with reference to all that is presented to the intellect, the memory, the tongue and the hand, that the pupils shall themselves seek, discover, discuss, do and repeat, without slacking, by their own efforts - the teachers being left merely with the task of seeing whether what is to be done is done, and done as it should be. 13

Such an ideal of intellectual education is bound to go hand in hand with ideas on moral education, and these will serve as a kind of cross-check to verify to what extent Comenius has value for us today. In an age when the cane was a teaching instrument (it was still recommended by Locke!) and the only school morality was that of obedience, could Comenius, as we do today, extract from the concepts of development and spontaneous activity a form of moral education that would also be an extension of those formative tendencies of nature to which the great educationist constantly refers in the parallel he draws between nature and man?

The touchstone in such a matter will be the question of retributive justice or punishment. And Comenius is radically opposed to corporal punishment:

Indeed, by any application of force we are far more likely to produce a distaste for letters than love for them. Whenever, therefore, we see that a mind is diseased and dislikes study, we should try to remove its indisposition by gentle remedies, but should on no account employ violent ones. The very sun in the heavens gives us a lesson on this point. In early spring, when plants are young and tender, he does not scorch them, but warms and invigorates them by slow degrees.... The gardener proceeds on the same principle, and does not apply the pruning-knife to plants that are immature. In the same way a musician does not strike his lyre a blow with his fist or with a stick, nor does he throw it against the wall, because it produces a discordant sound; but, setting to work on scientific principles, he tunes it and gets it into order. Just such a skilful and sympathetic treatment is necessary to instil a love of learning into the minds of our pupils, and any other procedure will only convert their idleness into antipathy and their lack of interest into downright stupidity. 14

But these decisive arguments against corporal punishment are not the only ones put forward by Comenius. His whole chapter on school discipline shows his effort to use positive sanctions (encouragement, emulation, etc.) rather than negative ones. In short, his disciplinary pedagogy shows the same spirit as his philosophy, where the theologian really gives little emphasis to original sin but speaks in constant praise of nature ‘in perpetual progress’ (cf. the title of Principle VII concerning the soundness of education and the school).

Besides these ideas on sanctions, Comenius’ central concept of moral education is again a functional one, illustrating his preference for practice by experience as against compulsion or verbal instruction:

The virtues are learned by constantly doing what is right.... it is by learning that we find out what we ought to learn, and by acting that we learn to act as we should. So then, as boys easily learn to walk by walking, to talk by talking, and to write by writing, in the same way we will learn obedience by obeying, abstinence by abstaining, truth by speaking the truth, and constancy by being constant. But it is necessary that the child be helped by advice and example at the same time. 15

But he who shows the way is not necessarily an adult. In a curious passage of the Methodus linguarum novissima, quoted by P. Bovet, Comenius lays stress on imitation and group games, bringing his systematic mind to outlining the seven characteristic factors of such games. He appears, in this connection, to, have recognized the role of the social relationship set up among players of games, as well as the role of competition and the rules imposed upon players by the game.

After having emphasized that these main concepts of Comenius’ theory of education are still very valid today, we must say a few words about his ideas on school organization. This topic will lead us, in the last part of out Introduction, to the social and international aspects of his doctrine.

At a time when education had neither stable institutions nor general programmes of study, Comenius endeavoured both to build up a rational administrative structure and to develop graduated, coherent programmes. All this elaborately detailed planning was dominated by a twofold requirement of unity: horizontal unity in respect of curricula at a given level and vertical unity in the hierarchy of the stages of education.

In the first of these two respects, it is striking that Comenius, in the sphere of science teaching (which does not appear to have been his favourite subject), has a very lively, very modern feeling of the interdependence of the sciences, necessitating co-ordination of the syllabuses:

From this [thoughts on the interaction of the parts of a system] it follows that it is a mistake to teach the several branches of science in detail before a general outline of the whole realm of knowledge has been placed before the student, and that no one should be instructed in such a way as to become proficient in any one branch of knowledge without thoroughly understanding its relation to the rest. 16

It is also interesting to see the importance Comenius attributes to the principle of the integration of previously acquired knowledge with that acquired later, following a pattern which is now matched even in our concepts of development.

As regards school organization, mention has already been made of the principle of subdivision into different levels corresponding to the various stages in mental development: the nursery school (or ‘mother’s knee’) for infants; the public or national school for children; the grammar school or secondary school for older children; and academies for students. But another very interesting point about this organization is that Comenius wishes it to be the same for everyone—one school system for all:

all the young of both sexes should be sent to the public schools.... they should first be sent to the Vernacular School. Some writers are of the contrary opinion. Zepper and Alsted would persuade us that only those boys and girls who are destined for manual labour should be sent to the Vernacular Schools, while boys whose parents wish them to receive a higher education should be sent straight to the Latin School.... From this view my whole didactic system forces me to dissent. 17

But Comenius is not satisfied merely with these general principles. He expresses astonishingly prophetic views on a number of questions. Two examples may be given here.

One of them concerns the education of girls. In this regard, he insists upon complete equality of the sexes, in accordance with his pansophic principle that everything must be taught to everyone:

Nor can any good reason be given why the weaker sex (to give a word of advice on this point in particular) should be altogether excluded from the pursuit of knowledge (whether in Latin or in their mother-tongue).... They are endowed with equal sharpness of mind and capacity for knowledge (often with more than the opposite sex) and they are able to attain the highest positions, since they have often been called by God Himself to rule over nations ... to the study of medicine and of other things which benefit the human race.... Why, therefore, should we admit them to the alphabet, and afterwards drive them away from books? 18

But if these statements in favour of girls’ education are a logical consequence of his system (and that in no way diminishes Comenius’ merit in remaining consistent), another corollary is much more surprising for the middle of the seventeenth century. It is his plea for the backward, ‘the naturally dull and stupid’. He states that ‘this renders more imperative the universal culture of such intellects. The slower and the weaker the disposition of any man, the more he needs assistance.... Nor can any man be found whose intellect is so weak that it cannot be improved by culture.’ 19

We thus see how the architecture of a system in which a parallel is established between man and perpetually formative nature inspires not only a functional system of education, but also a conception of the general organization of education. This leads us on to the social and international aspects of the doctrine.

III

An attempt has been made in the foregoing to show how up-to-date are Comenius’ ideas on education and, in particular, how modern his methodology. The most surprising, and in many respects the most modern, aspect of his doctrine has been kept till the last—his ideas on education