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A VISIONARY REFORMER OF

SCHOOLS

Giants in the History of Education

David I. Smith, PhD

Series Editor: David Diener, PhD

John AmosComenius:

John Amos Comenius: A Visionary Reformer of Schools© Classical Academic Press, 2017

Version 1.0

ISBN: 978-1-60051-316-9

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The expressed wish is for full power of development into full humanity not of one

particular person or a few or even many, but of every single individual, young and old, rich and poor, noble and ignoble, men and women, in a word, of every human being born on earth, with the ultimate aim of providing education

to the entire human race regardless of age, class, sex, and nationality.

—Comenius, Pampaedia

Table Of Contents

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .vii

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Chapter One—Life: Who Was Comenius? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1

Youth and Exile (1592–1627) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3

Pedagogy and Pansophy (1628–1641) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5

Sweden, Hungary, and Poland (1642–1656) . . . . . . . . . . . . .7

Final Years (1657–1670) and Legacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9

Chapter Two—Labyrinths: What Is Wrong with Education? . . .13

The World Is a Labyrinth. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13

Learning Is a Labyrinth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15

Students Are Labyrinths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18

Chapter Three—Gardens: What Are the Goals of Educational Reform? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21

Labyrinths and Gardens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23

The Great Didactic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25

The Pampaedia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26

Chapter Four—Humans: What Is the Nature of Learners? . . .29

Human Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .31

Reason and the Senses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32

Power and Virtue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34

Joy and Piety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38

Chapter Five—Harmony: What Holds Curriculum Together? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .43

The Threefold World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .45

Harmony in Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49

Chapter Six—Tools: How Does Vision Shape Practice? . . . . . .53

Books for Schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .53

Classical Texts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .61

Pedagogical Principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .64

School Structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66

Chapter Seven—Legacy: What Might Comenius Say to Us Today? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .69

Past and Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .70

Piety and Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .72

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .79

A Note on Comenius in English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .83

Questions for Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .85

About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .87

vii

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Dr. Bram de Muynck and Piet Booij for facili-tating a visit to the Comenius Museum and Mausoleum at Naarden in the Netherlands while I was working on this book, and to Dr. Hans van der Linde for his thoughtful hospitality at the museum. I am also grateful to my wife, several friends, and many teachers for kindly tolerating more talk from me about Comenius in recent months than might have been socially appropriate. As an introduc-tion to and summary of Comenius’s work, this volume is naturally deeply indebted to many who have devoted scholarly labor to Comenius, and most of all to Comenius himself.

ix

Introduction

This is a short book about a man who lived a long and com-plex life and wrote on a staggering array of topics. John Amos Comenius, a seventeenth-century theologian and reformer, had so great an influence on the later story of Western schooling that he is commonly dubbed the father of modern education in encyclo-pedia entries on his work. To this day he remains one of the most important and fascinating thinkers in the history of education, with research institutes and a journal dedicated to his work.

Comenius wrote literally hundreds of works in Czech and Latin.1 Unfortunately, many of these texts have been lost, only some of the rest exist in English, and only a few of those are easily accessible today. He is better known and more widely researched in Europe than in North America. Much of the large secondary literature is in Czech or German (among other languages). Thus the Comenius who is currently accessible to the popular English-speaking world is merely the tip of an iceberg.

In this short introduction to his work, I aim to sketch some of his central ideas and to point to important themes in a handful of key works that are somewhat accessible to English speakers. I hope to convey the broad impulses behind his tireless work for educa-tional reform and to highlight some of the important questions with which he wrestled long and hard—questions that remain pertinent today.

1. See Klaus Schaller, Johann Amos Comenius: Ein pädagogisches Porträt (Weinheim: Beltz Verlag, 2004), 13. Schaller puts the total at around 250 titles.

x Introduction

Before diving in, readers should take a moment to think about some of the challenges of coming to grips with Comenius. Precisely because of his importance for educational history, writers summa-rizing his work have been tempted to look for his anticipation of things we want to affirm today (See how cleverly he foreshadowed what we know now!) or for ways in which we have progressed beyond the seventeenth century (See what foolish things folks believed back then!). Either emphasis risks making Comenius a foil for our own presumed wisdom and progress, and reduces our capacity to learn from him. Like any commentator, I come with my own beliefs and interests, but I have tried to focus on his hopes and fears for the learners and communities he sought to serve. By trying to let him be himself, rather than a forerunner of ourselves, we have the best chance of hearing fresh challenges.

For some readers, such a reading will require patience with dif-ferences between his world and ours. We will find, for instance, that for Comenius theology and the theory and practice of education are much more closely interwoven than they are in most current edu-cational writing. This is not just a quaint cultural habit or rhetorical flourish; it is a structural part of his convictions, a central feature of his thought. If we try to filter out the theology, as some modern

[Comenius] had so great an influence on the later story of Western schooling that he is commonly dubbed the father of modern education in encyclopedia entries on his

work. To this day he remains one of the most important and fascinating thinkers in

the history of education.

xiIntroduction

commentators have done,2 the resulting picture will be grossly distorted. Although our focus will be on his educational thought, in order to properly understand that thought we also will have to pay some attention to the theological ideas that shape it.

In addition, we will find that Comenius is fond of analogies, allegories, and poetic images, to a degree that tends to charm some and irritate others, depending on their own cast of mind. This again not only reflects the styles of argument of his day, but also forms an explicit part of his quest for a form of wisdom that can discern the connections between things and keep the world from falling apart into fragmented facts. It pays to consider his purpose before judging his rhetorical strategy.

Given that a book of this length can only scratch the surface, a final challenge is to decide which aspects of Comenius we should summarize. His works that most influenced subsequent educational history were written around the middle of his career. Although he refined, adjusted, and extended his ideas in later books, these were lost to the public for hundreds of years. So then, should we focus on the famous Comenius, known from works that were not the ultimate articulation of his position, or on the most complete working out of his thought in works that have played a less public role? My solution will be to focus mainly on his proposals in the Didactica Magna (Great Didactic), his most widely known and accessible educational treatise, and on their development in the Pampaedia (Universal Education), his final articulation of his educational ideas. I also will draw from his allegorical Labyrint světa a ráj srdce (The Labyrinth of the World and Paradise of the Heart), and make passing references to other works along the way to provide some sense of a larger context. I hope to

2. This omission is discussed, e.g., in Jan Hábl, Lessons in Humanity from the Life and Work of John Amos Comenius (Bonn: Verlag für Kultur und Wissenschaft, 2011), 97–108; Júlia Ivanovičová, Katarina Račekova, and Anna Klimentová, “Comeniology in Slovakia—Its Tradition and Perspectives,” in Gewalt sei ferne den Dingen! Contemporary Perspectives on the Works of John Amos Comenius, ed. Wouter Goris, Meinert A. Meyer, and Vladimir Urbánek (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2016).

xii Introduction

convey the flavor of some key works, accepting for the sake of brev-ity the risk of compressing the chronological lines of development and the particular approaches of each work into a single composite picture.

The book begins by placing Comenius in his context. Chapter 1 offers a brief account of his life, while chapter 2 delves into his sharp, satirical sense of what was wrong with his times, the ills that motivated his educational reforms. We then turn in chapter 3 to his goals for education, and in chapter 4 to his vision of learners and how they should grow: what manner of beings we are, what kind of education is best fitted to our nature, and what kind of pedagogy is needed. Chapter 5 briefly explores the ideas of pansophy and panharmony—two great overarching frames that hold together his detailed proposals. Chapter 6 looks at those detailed proposals: the school textbooks that both anchored his fame and illustrated the coherence of his vision, as well as his recommendations for pedagogy and school structure. Finally, chapter 7 asks what we might learn for today’s schools from an educator who was addressing another century and a different social and intellectual context. The whole will be but a brief sketch of a large and varied landscape. If some theme is not mentioned here, it does not follow that Comenius did not address it, and I encourage the interested reader to explore his thought further using the resources listed at the end of this book.

1

1Chapter OneLife: Who Was Comenius?

Imagine a young person living in Central Europe after the end of the Middle Ages, during the dawn of modernity. Orphaned at the age of twelve, he is sent to live with relatives, which delays his education. When he is twenty-six, the Thirty Years’ War breaks out, laying waste to his homeland, and he soon loses his wife and chil-dren to a plague. He hides in caves and forests and spends decades as a refugee, continually displaced and often dependent on the charity of others. He takes refuge in other countries, only to be caught up in new wars there. He is an aspiring writer, but twice the towns in which he lives are burned down and he loses everything, including many of the books over which he had toiled. In his old age he invests his trust in a childhood friend who is prophesying a return of the refugees to their homeland. The prophecies prove false, and at the time of his death he is seen by many as a superstitious old man who made the wrong bets.

Now imagine a young person living in the same region, at the same time. After an education abroad, this young man sets his sights on reforming the church and schools of his homeland. He produces the first bilingual Latin-Czech dictionary, the first accurate map of Moravia, and works of literature, natural science, education theory, political theory, linguistics, history, and theology. He is celebrated

Despite frequent tragedy and hardship, he devoted his life to the improvement of schools

and the wider reform of society.

2 Chapter One—Life: Who Was Comenius?

throughout Europe for his contributions to educational and philo-sophical topics, and statesmen in several countries compete to secure his services for education-reform projects. He serves as a pastor, a bishop, and eventually as the leader of his denomination. His school textbooks are used in more than a dozen countries and for more than two centuries after his death. He is remembered as one of the most important figures in the history of Western education.

These are two sketches of the same life. Both describe the life of the Czech thinker and reformer Jan Komenský, known to posterity as John Amos Comenius.1 Despite frequent tragedy and hardship, he devoted his life to the improvement of schools and the wider reform of society. He ended his life lamenting the world’s disarray and lack of progress, yet his ideas have profoundly influenced the develop-ment of modern schooling.

1. Two very accessible longer accounts of Comenius’s life are Matthew Spinka, John Amos Comenius: That Incomparable Moravian, 2nd ed. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1969), and the opening chapters of Daniel Murphy, Comenius: A Critical Reassessment of His Life and Work (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1995). Other major sources are Stig G. Nordström and Wilhelm Sjöstrand, eds., Comenius’ Självbiografi: Comenius About Himself (Uppsala: Föreningen för Svensk Undervisningshistoria, 1976), which contains the Latin text of Comenius’s Continuatio Admonitiones Fraternae, his account of his own life, along with Swedish and English translations; and Milada Blekastad, Comenius: Versuch eines Umrisses von Leben, Werk und Schicksal des Jan Amos Komenský (Oslo/Prague: Universitetsforlaget/Academia, 1969), which is by far the most thorough study.

3Chapter One—Life: Who Was Comenius?

Portrait of Jan Amos Comenius, Jürgen Ovens, 1650–1670

Youth and Exile (1592–1627)

Comenius was born in Moravia (in the modern-day Czech Republic) on March 28, 1592. He was a lifelong member of the Unity of Brethren, a small Christian denomination that grew out of a fifteenth-century Reformation movement in Bohemia (next door to Moravia). This movement, emerging from the teachings of Petr Chelčický, had both similarities to and differences from the more widely known Western European Reformation movements. The Unity of Brethren were characterized by a distinctive combination of emphases on moral purity, peaceful unity with Christians of other confessions, and responsible service to society.2

After the early death of his parents, Comenius went to live with relatives, where he was put to work at a mill and was not sent to the

2. See Craig D. Atwood, The Theology of the Czech Brethren from Hus to Comenius (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009).


Latin school at Přerov until age sixteen. However, at the Latin school his talents were noticed by church leaders and they enabled him to move on to university studies at the Reformed Herborn Acad-emy, followed by a year at the University of Heidelberg. Comenius appears to have invested these years well, gaining a thorough expo-sure to the debates and leading thinkers of the day, including notable Calvinist and Lutheran educators and theologians.3

Returning to Moravia eager to apply his learning to the cultural development of his native land, Comenius first took up teaching and then, in 1616, was ordained as a pastor. He married Magdalena Vizovská, whom he knew through a family connection and who was the recipient of the only surviving love letter penned by Come-nius. They settled in Fulnek (a Moravian town where the Unity of Brethren were active), and were soon new parents. Comenius also embarked on the first of his prodigious literary projects. Never one for small plans, he set out to write a comprehensive Latin-Czech dic-tionary, a projected twenty-eight-volume encyclopedia, and also his Listové do nebe (Letters to Heaven), a literary work critically depicting the inequalities between rich and poor.

This happy period was short-lived. The Thirty Years’ War, with its massive bloodshed across Europe, began in 1618, and in 1621 Spanish troops destroyed Fulnek. Comenius went into hiding, forced to leave his pregnant wife and first child in the occupied town, and later with her mother. Before long, his wife and two small children had died of one of the plagues that followed the fighting, and his house and library had been burned. Bereaved and home-less, Comenius found refuge for a while on the estates of Moravian noblemen. While there, he worked on religious treatises and a celebrated allegory, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of

3. Significant influences on Comenius who gave impetus to his enthusiasm for educational reform and his irenic vision included Johannes Piscator, Johann Heinrich Alsted, Wolfgang Ratke, Johannes Althusius, David Pareus, and Johann Valentin Andreae. See the sources listed in footnote 1 for more detail.


the Heart, and also translated the Psalms into Czech. He remained productive, yet found himself “miserably in hiding for fear of human fury.”4 He wrote: “Woe is to us on all sides: a cruel, bloody sword is destroying my dear homeland; castles, fortresses, and strong cities are conquered; towns, villages, splendid houses, and churches are plundered and burned; estates are robbed, livestock is taken and killed; the poor populace is subjected to suffering, torture, and here and there even murder and capture. . . . It would seem that every-thing will perhaps soon be turned into a desert.”5

In 1627 a decree was issued requiring all Protestants in Bohemia to convert to Roman Catholicism or leave. After various hiding places became untenable, he and his fellow Moravian Brethren were finally forced to seek refuge in Poland, little suspecting that this would be a permanent exile. He settled in Leszno with his second wife, Dorota Cyrillová, the daughter of a fellow pastor who later became senior bishop of the Unity of Brethren. They had married in 1624.

Pedagogy and Pansophy (1628–1641)

In Leszno Comenius began work on his Great Didactic, a major work of pedagogical reform eventually published in Latin in 1657. His appointment to a position as co-rector of the Gymnasium (secondary school) in Leszno provided him with a practical context in which to work out his ideas, which increasingly set educational reform in the wider context of the general improvement of human affairs. He also turned his efforts to improving school textbooks for the teaching of Latin, which was then central to the school curriculum. In 1631 he published the Janua Linguarum Reserata (Gate of Tongues Unlocked ),

4. This quotation is from his work Truchlivý (The Sorrowful ), quoted in Murphy, Comenius, 12.5. Ibid.


a Latin textbook that departed radically from the standard methods of the time. He replaced a focus on rote learning of Latin literary texts with a focus on phrases connected with everyday experience and arranged in a way that combined practicality, moral purpose, and humor. The book, to which he added companion volumes graded by level, was a sensational success. Editions appeared in Arabic, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Mongolian, Persian, Pol-ish, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish; it became one of the most widely circulated books in Europe. The school where he worked flourished under his reforms. He introduced a disciplined schedule, a broad curriculum, a focus on play, and an emphasis on relating learning to the learner’s experience of the world.

Comenius also became involved in ecumenical work, seeking to bring about peace and reconciliation between the warring branches of Christianity, and as part of his efforts in this direction, he set to work on his most ambitious project of all. This was an attempt to synthesize the findings of natural science, theology, and the human-ities in a unified Christian pansophia (universal wisdom), a project for which he became celebrated in a Europe fascinated at the time by such schemes. Descartes (with whom he conducted an amicable debate in 1642) complained that Comenius had mixed too much theology into his philosophy; the Unity of Brethren, meanwhile, worried about too much philosophy in his theology. Comenius him-self insisted on the organic connections between the various areas of knowledge and the ultimate harmony of the whole.

He replaced a focus on rote learning of Latin literary texts with a focus on phrases connected

with everyday experience and arranged in a way that combined practicality, moral

purpose, and humor.


In 1641 he was invited to England to help found a college designed to embody his ideas about pansophia in its curriculum. He discovered to his consternation that two treatises that he had hastily drafted to inform English colleagues of his plans had been translated and published in English without his knowledge.6 While he was in England, he was asked to remain there to work on educational reform, and there is some evidence that he also was invited to move to New England to lead the recently founded Harvard College (later Harvard University). However, conflict in Ireland and the outbreak of the English Civil War interrupted these matters. He was solicited for educational work in France, Germany, and Poland, and besides the widespread Protestant enthusiasm for his work, there was also interest from Roman Catholic and Muslim quarters. In the end he went to Sweden, swayed by an offer of financial support not only for himself, but also for his suffering denomination.

Sweden, Hungary, and Poland (1642–1656)

In Sweden Comenius met with the queen, who had learned Latin from his textbooks, and the chancellor, who set him to work reforming the Swedish education system. He settled with his family in Elbing, on the Prussian coast close to Sweden, and spent six years preparing textbooks for Swedish schools and composing a major restatement of his pedagogical principles, the Linguarum Methodus Novissima (Newest Method of Language Study). These were eagerly adopted, but political and theological frictions led to the termina-tion of his employment. He returned to Leszno, Poland, in 1648. Within days of his arrival, his second wife died after a lingering illness, leaving him alone with four children.

6. John Amos Comenius, A Reformation of Schooles, trans. Samuel Hartlib (London: Printed for Michael Sparke, 1642).


Upon his return, the death of a friend and colleague also left him as the last surviving bishop of the Unity of Brethren. In the same year, the Thirty Years’ War finally came to an end. Unfortunately, the Peace of Westphalia made no provision for religious freedom for the Brethren and confirmed their homeland as Roman Catholic. The exile was permanent.

By the end of 1649, he was married for a third time (to Johana Gajusová), and a fresh invitation had arrived, this time to reform schools in Hungary, where there was another community of exiled Brethren. He traveled there in 1650 and met with Prince Sigismund, whose mother planned to found a pansophic school in Sárospatak; Comenius was recruited to lead the reforms. The support of Prince Sigismund counterbalanced resistance from those within the school who did not share his vision. When the prince died prematurely, Comenius’s position became more difficult in spite of the apparent success of his methods as evidenced in the gains that the community perceived in student learning. His emphasis on the role of play in learning and his involvement of students in dramatic performances were a particular source of conflict with those who conceived of learning in more authoritarian terms. During this time, two signifi-cant works emerged: the Schola Ludus (School as Play), which offered theatrical performances as a means of learning school subjects, and the Orbis Sensualium Pictus (World of Sensory Things in Pictures), an important and innovative illustrated language textbook that won lasting fame.

In 1655 Comenius returned to Leszno, where disaster struck again. That same year, Charles X of Sweden invaded Poland with the public support of prominent Protestants, including Comenius. When the invasion faltered and ultimately failed, Leszno, where Comenius was pastoring, suffered reprisals from the Catholic Polish forces. In 1656 the city was burned to the ground; many of its resi-dents fled or were tortured and killed. Comenius barely escaped and lost everything—not only money and possessions, but manuscript


copies of books over which he had labored for decades. His Czech-Latin dictionary and his encyclopedic project, almost complete after forty-six years of patient work, were lost, as were various other works being prepared for publication. Now sixty-four years old, Comenius once again found himself fleeing for his life with his home and work destroyed, and taking refuge on the estates of a sympathetic noble-man, this time in Silesia.

Final Years (1657–1670) and Legacy

Eventually Comenius found his last home in Amsterdam, where he was welcomed and given financial assistance. The city council and other wealthy supporters sponsored him to gather and publish his collected educational works.

The multivolume Opera Didactica Omnia (Collected Didactic Works) appeared in 1657, bringing together a lifetime of pedagogical reflection and experiment. During his time in Amsterdam, Comenius also undertook to publish the collected prophecies of several individ-uals, one of them a friend since childhood, who had been declaring God’s plan for an imminent Protestant victory and the restoration of the Brethren to their homeland. Comenius believed in prophetic revelation, and it is easy to imagine the appeal of prophecies of resto-ration, even ones involving victorious armies, to one who had spent his life amid exile, loss, and frequent disappointment. The prophecies proved unfounded, however, and won him mainly criticism and contempt, both during his life and in the eyes of posterity. He also published a hymnal, sponsored a project to translate the Bible into Turkish, and published Angelus Pacis (The Angel of Peace), which advocated for peace and unity among warring Christian nations.7

7. John Amos Comenius, The Angel of Peace, trans. W. A. Morison (New York: Pantheon, 1944).


Comenius was now in his final years. In his Via Lucis (Way of Light), he describes himself as “one of the humble men of heart, the aged Comenius, whose life went down in sorrows, and his years in lamentations.”8 Nevertheless, in his last years he continued to work toward future reform, and labored over a seven-volume consulta-tion, the De Rerum Humanorum Emendatione Consultatio Catholica (General Deliberation Concerning the Reform of Human Affairs). It included plans for the reform of individuals, families, churches, schools, political processes, linguistics, and philosophy. It remained incomplete at his death on November 15, 1670, and much of it languished in a German library, lost to view for centuries until it was finally published in 1966.

Even at the end, he was still looking forward to those who might take up the work he had proposed. “I have done what I could,” he wrote in the Pannuthesia, the final volume of the Consultatio. “If the weakness due to old age and overwork or the misfortunes and dis-tractions of a busy life have prevented me from doing much more, I trust that I shall be forgiven. I shall not be the first nor the last of those who have wished to do more than they could manage, that is to say, who have devoted themselves wholeheartedly in pursuance of the public good although their strength was failing.”9 By the time of his death, he had written an impressive array of works, only the most famous of which have been mentioned here, and reshaped schooling in several countries.10

In the hundred years immediately following his death, Come-nius’s textbooks continued to be used and to find admirers, but his

8. John Amos Comenius, The Way of Light, trans. E. T. Campagnac (Liverpool/London: The University Press/Hodder & Stoughton, 1938), dedication, 26.

9. John Amos Comenius, Pannuthesia or Universal Warning, trans. A. M. O. Dobbie (Ship-ston-on-Stour: Peter Drinkwater, 1991), IV.7, 17.

10. A concise chronological outline of Comenius’s writings can be found in Jan Hábl, Lessons in Humanity from the Life and Work of John Amos Comenius (Bonn: Verlag für Kultur und Wissenschaft, 2011), 111–116. Around fifty of Comenius’s works are lost.


educational theories were given little attention.11 He was rediscov-ered as an educational thinker in the early eighteenth century, after which time there was increasing attention to his work, leading to his being celebrated as a major contributor to modern education and an important figure in Czech history. Many modern school systems echo his proposals in their structure and methods.

Modern studies of Comenius often have read his work through a post-Enlightenment (and, in Eastern Europe, communist) lens that assimilated his pedagogical suggestions to modern ideas, stressing his anticipation of current views while leaving his own theological and philosophical framework aside. In time, more of his works have been rediscovered (a process lasting well into the twentieth century), and the discipline of Comeniology has continued to grow.12 Through these efforts has emerged a richer, more complex picture of Come-nius’s thinking that recognizes the integral connections among the many facets of his thinking. We will begin to explore this picture in the chapters that follow.

11. J. E. Sadler, J . A . Comenius and the Concept of Universal Education (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966), 28.

12. The journal Acta Comeniana (http://komeniologie.flu.cas.cz/en/acta-comeniana-international- review/acta-comeniana) is devoted to study of Comenius, and there are institutes devoted to research on Comenius in several countries. I have sought to represent something of the interna-tional breadth of Comenius scholarship in the choice of works cited in this volume.

13

2Chapter TwoLabyrinths: What Is Wrong with Education?

King Minos of Crete, so ancient versions of the legend tell us, had his architect, Daedalus, construct a labyrinth. It was so full of cunning complexity that Daedalus himself had trouble escaping from it once it was built. In this labyrinth lurked a monster, half human and half bull, which regularly devoured those cast into the maze. This continued until the Athenian hero Theseus entered the labyrinth equipped with a thread provided by Ariadne, Minos’s daughter. Thanks to the thread, Theseus was able to navigate the maze, slay the Minotaur, and emerge alive.

The World Is a Labyrinth

Comenius saw the world not as indifferent matter driven by chance, but as a theater in which humans are to responsibly play their role before God and attend to the wonders set before them. Neither his theology nor his life experiences, however, allowed him the pretense that the world is as it should be, a theater of only order and beauty.1 Through our overreliance on ourselves and our seeking of goals and meaning within ourselves, the world has been jolted from its true center in God. We now view the world through spectacles of delusion, and the Cretan labyrinth “was a joke compared with the way the laby-rinth of this world is arranged.”2 So laments Comenius in his scathing

1. The encyclopedic work over which Comenius labored for so many years was titled Theatrum universitatis rerum (The Theater of All Things). On the transition from theater to labyrinth, see Jan Hábl, Lessons in Humanity from the Life and Work of John Amos Comenius (Bonn: Verlag für Kultur und Wissenschaft, 2011), 44–46.

2. John Amos Comenius, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, trans. How-ard Louthan and Andrea Sterk (New York/Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1998), I.2, 63.

14 Chapter Two—Labyrinths: What Is Wrong with Education?

satire of human folly, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart. Imagery of labyrinths is woven throughout Comenius’s writings, and he retold the story of Theseus in several places.3 It serves as an allegory for the human condition and an image for the confusion and disarray that he hoped to improve through school reform. A thorough reform of schools is needed, believed Comenius, because the world itself is a labyrinth without hope unless we can find the right thread.

Comenius lived at a time of upheaval, widespread violence, sectar-ian hatred, and the erosion of once-stable social and intellectual struc-tures.4 Medieval feudalism and the stable social roles it provided were at an end, supplanted by the rise of market towns and the merchant class. The emergence of new nation-states in place of constellations of feudal lords was accompanied by long and bloody wars and by perse-cution of groups that did not easily fit into the new order. The Chris-tian-classical synthesis of reason and faith that had oriented the Middle Ages was fragmenting. The various theologies of the Reformation created fractious opposition to the formerly supreme Roman Catholic Church without being able to reach agreement among themselves. In philosophy, the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Bacon purported to offer new foundations for certain knowledge; yet here too

3. See, for example, John Amos Comenius, Unum Necessarium . The One Thing Necessary or: The One Thing Needful, trans. Vernon H. Nelson (Winston-Salem, NC: Moravian Archives, 2008), I.5, 15; Vladimir Jelinek, trans., The Analytical Didactic of Comenius (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 89.

4. See Miroslav Hroch, “The World as a Labyrinth,” in Homage to J . A . Comenius, ed. Jaroslav Pešková, Josef Cach, and Michal Svatoš (Praha: Karolinum, 1991).

Comenius saw the world not as indifferent matter driven by chance, but as a theater in which humans are to responsibly play

their role before God and attend to the wonders set before them.

15Chapter Two—Labyrinths: What Is Wrong with Education?

consensus proved elusive. As Comenius pondered the world and its con-temporary critics,5 he lamented the wanton violence, the fragmentation of communities, the selfish individualism and greedy ambition, the rifts between rich and poor, the loss of wholeness of mind, and the failure of basic human callings such as work, rest, reflection, and relationships to provide real peace and satisfaction. He saw a world chaotic and fallen, in which we find ourselves plagued with confusion, grief, unfulfilled desires, and wearisome labor. Thanks to human disobedience, “The King of the universe has transformed the theater of his wisdom, this world made for our sakes, into a labyrinth.”6

Learning Is a Labyrinth

The challenges facing education are therefore enormous. Can we perhaps look to scholars and schools to offer us a thread through the labyrinth? According to Comenius, we cannot, unless serious changes are made.

In his The Labyrinth of the World, Comenius writes of a pilgrim coming to the workplaces of the learned and seeing how they behave with their books, pictured as containers of medicine. Some are “stuffing themselves with whatever came into their hands” but are never satisfied and gain no weight.7 The pilgrim notices that “what they crammed into themselves came out of them again undigested, either from above or from below.”8 Some digested no books at all, and had no inner store of knowledge, but just carried them around, often losing them. Some made beautiful gold cases for their books and liked looking at them and showing them off to strangers. Some stole material from others and

5. See Josef Petráň and Lydia Petráňová, “An Autobiographical Statement of the Young Come-nius in the Labyrinth of the World,” in Homage to J . A . Comenius, ed. Jaroslav Pešková, Josef Cach, and Michal Svatoš (Praha: Karolinum, 1991).

6. Comenius, Unum Necessarium, I.6, 16.7. Comenius, Labyrinth, X.7, 96.8. Ibid.


diluted it, “even with dirty dishwater,” or thickened it with “dust and refuse” to make it seem new, extolling it as their own invention.9 They then brought these mixtures to people and “crammed them down their throats against their will.”10 The mixtures turned out to be toxic, and “the more of these medicines a person gulped down, the more he vom-ited, turned pale, faded, and wasted away.”11 Meanwhile, each fought with the others, and “the more learned one considered himself or was esteemed by others, the more quarrels he began; and he fought, hacked, threw, and shot those around him until it was frightful to behold.”12 So much for scholars bringing order to the labyrinth of the world.

Translating this vivid comic imagery of quarrelsome academics vomiting and defecating their undigested knowledge and forcing poi-sons down students’ throats into more prosaic terms, we see Come-nius leveling several accusations against the teaching profession: Too much learning is from books that offer a distant substitute for reality. Too many teachers set themselves up as guides while lacking their own inner store of wisdom. Too much teaching is the violent imposition on students of content that will not actually contribute to their flour-ishing. Too many of the disciplines are thickets of confusing opinions, each at war with the rest. Politics is marked by intrigue and dishon-esty, philosophy by disagreement, religion by hypocrisy and impiety.13 The learned offer wearisome, unedifying, self-serving, conflicted, secondhand tales in place of truth, and the wisdom of the world turns out to be foolishness: “The study of learning is such an intricate, and confounding labyrinth, that few can find the way out of it; such a sea as swallows up those, who would goe about to empty it.”14

9. Ibid., X.7–9, 96–99.10. Ibid., X.9, 99.11. Ibid.12. Ibid., X.10, 100.13. John Amos Comenius, Panorthosia or Universal Reform, Chapters 19–26, trans. A. M. O.

Dobbie (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), XIX.17, 16.14. John Amos Comenius, A Reformation of Schooles, trans. Samuel Hartlib (London: Printed

for Michael Sparke, 1642), 12.


If scholars are a mess, what about schools? Like many early modern writers, Comenius was not impressed by the schools that he experienced. Schooling was only available to the few, the male, the wealthy. Students engaged mainly in rote learning of classical texts in Latin. Learning was stilted, passive, pedantic, unnecessarily complex, and heavily focused on memorization. Harsh physical punishment was used to keep order.

Comenius’s pilgrim looks on crowds of young people being examined to see whether they can be admitted to a school that he depicts as a prison overseen by armed guards. The examinations are rigorous, first testing whether “the head were of steel, the brain inside it of mercury, the buttocks of lead, the skin of iron, and the purse of gold.” The pilgrim’s guide explains the rationale for these tests: “If one does not have a head of steel, it will burst; without a brain of mercury, he would not have a mirror; without skin of sheet iron, he would not endure the educational process; without a seat of lead, he would not endure sitting and would lose everything; and without a purse of gold, where would he obtain time and teachers, both living and dead?”15

If the candidates lack any of these things, they are turned away or are admitted but face failure. If they have the necessary character-istics, they are handed over to guards, who set about reshaping them through “toil and pain,” even trying to “bore holes in their heads and pour something into them.” Students are “struck with fists, pointers, rods, and canes on their face, head, back, and seat” until they are bloodied and bruised.16 Some flee, and only a few persevere. Again, the imagery is vivid, but the point is sober. Schooling, Comenius charges, is exclusionary and violent, and reduces the wonder of the world to tedious drudgery.

15. Comenius, Labyrinth, X.2, 94.16. Ibid., X.3, 94–95.


Students Are Labyrinths

Even the learners are not innocent. At one point Comenius comments, “The whole world is a great labyrinth with innumerable lesser ones enclosed, so that there is no one who does not wander about some labyrinth, and some wander about many. If we could look at the minds of all men, we would see entangled thoughts, fantastic wanderings, and great circling about.”17 The social chaos of the outside world, the tangle of the academy, and the failings of schools might seem like problems enough, but there is more. If we look inside, we find that our minds too, our thoughts and motiva-tions and desires, are endless labyrinths.18

Why do we seek learning in the first place? Referring to Bernard of Clairvaux (who was in turn echoing a long tradition of reflection on how virtues and vices relate to learning), Comenius charges that “most men wish to know for the sake of knowing, which he describes as base inquisitiveness, or for the sake of being known, which he calls base vanity, or for the sake of selling their knowledge for money or honors, which he calls base profiteering.”19 Each of these motives drags learning outside of the frame of love of God and neighbor, focusing instead only on immediate benefits that revolve around ourselves: the satisfaction of our curiosity, a reputation for being clever, or an increase in wealth and status.20 The learning self is turned in upon its own concerns and away from the true center. We learn for the wrong reasons, and that distorts our growth.

17. Comenius, Unum Necessarium, I.6, 16.18. Jelinek, Analytical Didactic, 90.19. Comenius, Panorthosia 19–26, XXII.14, 43. Comenius makes the same point in the

Reformation of Schooles, 4: “Whether we seeke knowledge for curiosity, or to please, and delight our mind, or to raise our selves in esteeme, and credit in the world, or as the meanes to better our outward estates, and fortunes, we are too grossely minded to propose so base, and temporary ends to a gift so high, and so divine.”

20. This does not mean that it is wrong to be interested in ideas or to learn in order to make a living, any more than the reality of gluttony means that the appetite for food is wrong. The question concerns which motives are central and which are subordinate.


Schools in turn pander to these “faulty intentions” and become corrupted.21 Schools become more preoccupied with their status and reputation than with the growth of their students. They market themselves as means to wealth or forms of entertainment, aiming for worldly success and fun rather than virtue and service. They seek to titillate rather than transform. The situation cries out for refor-mation: “Such baseness must therefore be removed from schools by establishing them as markets of divine wisdom, and public factories of light and peace and salvation. All who gain a place in them must learn to pass this period of transient life in such a way as to serve them well in eternity.”22 In these words we hear a note of hope—the dire situation is painted vividly in order that we might respond. All things are corrupted, reduced to hopeless labyrinths, and neither the learned nor their schools nor the minds of learners can, from within their own resources, offer ways out, for they share in the corruption. “The world is indeed a labyrinth, full of error, exhaustion, and illusion.”23

Yet the story of the Minoan labyrinth also contains a golden thread, and the appropriate response to the sorry state of the world is neither despair nor pious withdrawal. As we shall see in the next chapter, Comenius does hope for escape. Although students share in the fall of Adam, and therefore must be trained to virtue, compared to adults they are less entangled in the specific confusions of society, and begin life innocent of its specific crimes. Thus there is more room and hope for their reform and growth. The reform of schools is necessary, believes Comenius, because of the strategic role that they play in reforming students and helping them to overcome the labyrinth of the world.

21. Comenius, Panorthosia 19–26, XXII.14, 42.22. Ibid., XXII.14, 43.23. Comenius, Unum Necessarium, III.1, 29.

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