Comenius: And the Beginnings of Educational Reform

Monroe

Table of Contents

PREFACE

CHAPTER I.  EUROPEAN EDUCATION IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

CHAPTER II.  FORERUNNERS OF COMENIUS

CHAPTER III.  BOYHOOD AND EARLY LIFE OF COMENIUS: 1592–1628

CHAPTER IV.  CAREER AS AN EDUCATIONAL REFORMER: 1628–1656

CHAPTER V.  CLOSING YEARS: 1656–1670

CHAPTER VI.  PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION

CHAPTER VII.  EARLIEST EDUCATION OF THE CHILD

CHAPTER VIII.  STUDY OF LANGUAGE

CHAPTER IX.  INFLUENCE OF COMENIUS ON MODERN EDUCATORS

CHAPTER X.  PERMANENT INFLUENCE OF COMENIUS

APPENDICES

FOOTNOTES:

PREFACE

The present volume is an effort to trace the reform movement in education from Vives, Bacon, and Ratke to Comenius, who gave the movement its most significant force and direction; and from him to the later reformers,—Francke, Rousseau, Basedow, Pestalozzi, Fröbel, and Herbart. A variety of ideas, interests, and adaptations, all distinctly modern, are represented in the life-creeds of these reformers; and, in the absence of a more satisfactory term, the progressive movement which they represent has been styled realism,—sometimes called the new education.

It has been well said that the dead hand of spiritual ancestry lays no more sacred duty on posterity than that of realizing under happier circumstances ideas which the stress of age or the shortness of life has deprived of their accomplishment. Many of the reforms represented by the realists occupy no inconsiderable place in the platforms of modern practitioners of education; and in the belief that a history of the movement might contribute toward the ultimate reforms which realism represents, it has seemed expedient to focus such a survey on the life and teachings of the strongest personality and chief exponent of the movement.

The condition of education in Europe during the sixteenth century is briefly told in the opening chapter; following are given the traces of the educational development of Comenius in the writings of Vives, Bacon, and Ratke; three chapters are devoted to the life of Comenius and the reforms in which he actively participated; an exposition of his educational writings has three chapters; a chapter is given to the influence of Comenius on Francke, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and other modern reformers; and the closing chapter sums up his permanent influence. The volume has two appendices,—one giving tables of dates relating to the life and writings of Comenius, and the other a select annotated bibliography.

In the exposition of the writings of Comenius, the author has made liberal use of English and German translations from Latin and Czech originals. In the case of the Great didactic, the scholarly translation by Mr. Keatinge has, in the main, been followed. Free translations of portions of this work had been made by the author before the appearance of Mr. Keatinge’s book; and in some instances these have been retained. As regards the account of Comenius’ views on the earliest education of the child, the author’s edition of the School of infancy has been followed; and in the discussion of reforms in language teaching, he is indebted to Mr. Bardeen’s edition of the Orbis pictus, and to Dr. William T. Harris for the use of the handsome Elzevir edition of the Janua, which is the property of the Bureau of Education.

WILL S. MONROE.

State Normal School,

    Westfield, Mass.

CHAPTER I.

EUROPEAN EDUCATION IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

Humanism, realism, and naturalism characterized—Devotion of the sixteenth century to the humanistic ideal—Study of Latin eloquence—Style the chief aim—Neglect of the mother-tongue—Views of John Sturm and the Jesuits—Devotion to Cicero—Decadence of the later humanists—Erasmus and Melanchthon on the enrichment of the course of study—Satires of Rabelais directed against the humanists—Protests of Montaigne—Attitude of Ascham and Mulcaster—Transition from humanism to realism.

Education in Europe, says Oscar Browning,¹ has passed through three phases, which may conveniently be called humanism, realism, and naturalism. The first is grounded upon the study of language, and especially of the two dead languages, Greek and Latin. The second is based upon the study of things instead of words, the education of the mind through the eye and the hand. Closely connected with this is the study of those things which may be of direct influence upon and direct importance to life. The third is not in the first instance study at all. It is an attempt to build up the whole nature of man,—to educate first his body, then his character, and lastly his mind.

The sixteenth century was wedded to the humanistic ideal of education. Without regard for the diversity of avocations, classical culture was held to be the safest and best training for the manifold duties of life. Aristotle’s Politics was considered the wisest utterance on the direction of affairs of state; Cæsar’s Commentaries the safest guides to military eminence; the practical Stoicism of the Latin authors the most infallible basis for ethics and the regulation of conduct; and as for agriculture, had not Virgil written a treatise on that subject? It was clear in the minds of the sixteenth-century humanists that classical culture furnished the best preparation, alike for theologians and artisans.

To accomplish this purpose, as soon as the child was considered sufficiently matured for linguistic discipline, and this varied from the sixth to the ninth years, he was initiated into the mysteries of Latin eloquence. His preliminary training consisted in a verbal study of the Latin grammar for purposes of precision in speech and successful imitation; but, as the grammar was printed in Latin, with its hundreds of incomprehensible rules and exceptions, all of which had to be learned by heart, the way of the young learner was, indeed, a thorny one. True, the classical authors were later read, but chiefly for the purpose of gleaning from them choice phrases to be used in the construction of Latin sentences, or for purposes of disputations in dialectics. Logic and history were given most subordinate places in the course of study, the former merely that it might give greater precision in writing and speaking, and the latter that it might furnish illustrations in rhetorical exercises.

This conception of education was almost universally held in the sixteenth century, by Protestants like Trotzendorf and Sturm, as well as by Catholics like Aquaviva and the members of the Society of Jesus. Nor was it confined to elementary and secondary education; for, as Professor Paulsen² has shown, the conquest of European universities by the humanists was complete by the second decade of the sixteenth century. The statutes of most of the universities at this time make the speaking of the Latin compulsory. That at Ingolstadt reads: A master in a bursary shall induce to the continual use of Latin by verbal exhortations and by his own example; and shall also appoint those who shall mark such as speak the vulgar tongue and shall receive from them an irremissible penalty. Again: That the students in their academical exercises may learn by the habit of speaking Latin to speak and express themselves better, the faculty ordains that no person placed by the faculty upon a common or other bursary shall dare to speak German. Any one heard by one of the overseers to speak German shall pay one kreutzer. There grew out of this prohibition a widespread system of spying. The spies reported to the university authorities on such students (vulgarisantes they were called) who persisted in speaking in the mother-tongue. In spite, however, of statutes, spies, fines, and floggings, the boys in the sixteenth century spoke little Latin when they were alone by themselves. Cordier,³ writing in 1530, says, Our boys always chatter French with their companions; or if they try to talk Latin, cannot keep it up.

The old ecclesiastical Latin of the Middle Ages had been superseded by the classical Latin of the Roman poets, and all the energies of the educational institutions were thrown into the acquisition and practice of Latin eloquence. The classics were read for the phrases that might be culled for use in the construction of Latin sentences; these, with disputations, declamations, and Latin plays, were the order of the century. Since education consisted in the acquisition of a graceful and elegant style, the young learner, from the first, applied himself to the grammatical study of Latin authors, regarding solely the language of the classics, and taking subject-matter into account only when this was necessary to understand the words.

There was no study of the mother-tongue preliminary to the study of the classics. Children began at once the study of the Latin grammar, and they had to write Latin verses before they had been exercised in compositions, in the vernacular, or, for that matter, before they had been trained to express their thoughts in Latin prose. And still more remarkable, as Oscar Browning points out, the Latin taught was not the masculine language of Lucretius and Cæsar, but the ornate and artificial diction of Horace and Virgil, and, above all, of Cicero. There is no doubt, he adds, that narrow and faulty as it was, it gave a good education so long as people believed in it. To know Horace and Virgil by heart became the first duty of the scholar. Speeches in Parliament were considered incomplete if they did not contain at least one Latin quotation. A false quantity was held to be a greater crime than a slip in logical argument. Cicero not only influenced the education of English statesmen, but had no inconsiderable effect on their conduct.

The humanist educators of the sixteenth century not only neglected the study of the mother-tongue—they proscribed it. The Ratio⁴ of the Jesuits forbids its use except on holidays, and Sturm at Strasburg abbreviated the recreation periods of his pupils because of risks of speaking in the mother-tongue on the playground. And all this proscription of the vernacular that students might acquire eloquence in a foreign tongue. Well does Raumer⁵ ask, Why did they continue, like a second Sisyphus, their fruitless endeavors to metamorphose German into Roman youths, and to impart to them, in defiance of the laws of human nature, another tongue?

They were themselves deceived in assuming that they could call to life the ancient culture of Rome and Greece. Indeed, they believed that they had discovered ways of training which would develop scholars capable of producing Latin works equal to the masterpieces that they had studied in their schools. John Sturm, one of the most ardent of the humanists, said: The Romans had two advantages over us; the one consisted in learning Latin without going to school, and the other in frequently seeing Latin comedies and tragedies acted, and in hearing Latin orators speak. Could we recall these advantages in our schools, why could we not, by persevering diligence, gain what they possessed by accident and habit—namely, the power of speaking Latin to perfection? I hope to see the men of the present age, in their writing and speaking, not merely followers of the old masters, but equal to those who flourished in the noblest age of Athens and Rome. But how misguided and mistaken!

Not only did Latin monopolize the curriculum of the sixteenth-century school, but the study was primarily philological, for grammatical structure, and only secondarily for the content of the literature, for a correct understanding of the author. As a matter of fact, the method of study was such as to make intelligent comprehension of the author’s thought next to impossible, since the humanists simply culled out phrases which might be imitated and used in the exercises of style. Raumer says of this kind of teaching: The author was not an end, but only a means to an end—the cultivation of deified Roman eloquence in boys. And why? Precisely as the peacock was used by the jackdaw. They borrowed the author’s words and phrases, grouped them together, and learned them by heart, in order subsequently to apply them in speech or writing. Borrow is too feeble an expression; for the jackdaw designed not merely to borrow the peacock’s feathers, but to represent them as his own. The doctrine of imitation, as set forth by Sturm and the others, was, after all, a mere jackdaw theory. The pupil was taught how, by a slight alteration, to disguise phrases from Cicero, and then to use them in writing or speech, exactly as if they were his own productions, so adroitly smuggling them in that the readers or hearers might not suspect from whence they were taken. Says Sturm: ‘When the teacher gives out themes for composition, he should draw attention to those points where imitation is desirable, and show how similarity may be concealed by a superadded variation.’ Again: ‘We must, in the first place, take care that the similarity shall not be manifest. Its concealment may be accomplished in three ways—by adding, by taking away, and by alteration.’

In this mad race for Latin eloquence, the sixteenth-century humanists became more and more circumscribed in the choice of authors. Sturm, for example, placed Cicero at the head of the list, because of the faultless models of his eloquence. The Jesuits likewise held Cicero in high esteem. Said one of their writers, Style should be drawn almost exclusively from Cicero, although the most approved of the historians need not on that account be overlooked. Again: The pattern we should follow in style is comprehended in the words of the rule, ‘imitate Cicero.’ As in the study of theology we follow the divine Thomas Aquinas, and in philosophy Aristotle, so in the humanities Cicero must be regarded as our peculiar and preëminent leader. For he has been crowned by the palm of superior praise by the common consent of the world. But some, misguided by a wilful and self-formed taste, have gone astray, preferring a style totally different from that of Cicero; such an erratic course is quite at variance with the genius of our institutions and hostile to the spirit of prompt obedience.

This servile devotion to Cicero, it should be recalled, was a marked departure from the more varied and richer curricula of the fifteenth-century humanists,⁶ when men of the stamp of Vittorino da Feltre, Leonardo Bruni, Vergarius, Sylvius, and Guarino were the standard-bearers of humanism. Many causes had conspired to bring about this decadence; and perhaps the most fundamental cause was the senseless worship of forms of expression. The later humanists worshipped the forms of thought. Beauty of expression, says Professor Laurie,⁷ "was regarded as inseparable from