Who is comenius

He found refuge in Poland, England, Prussia, Hungary, and the Netherlands as a scholar and bishop of his church until his death in Amsterdam. Pained by the political and religious strife that plagued seventeenth-century Europe, Comenius authored more than works as he searched for a method to alleviate human suffering while uniting all people and religions through a common appreciation of God.

Comenius is best known for his innovations in pedagogy, but one cannot gain an adequate appreciation of his educational ideas without recognizing his religious and metaphysical convictions. Despite the prevalent human suffering of his day, Comenius remained optimistic about the future of mankind, as he believed in the immanence of God and the imminence of God's kingdom on Earth. As God's creations, humans were necessarily good, not corrupt. Comenius also felt that Christ's Second Coming would end human strife but that people themselves could act in ushering the new millennium by engaging in pansophy, or the lifelong study of an encyclopedic system of human knowledge.

By seeing the harmony among everything in the universe, all human beings would come to acknowledge God's glory and presence in themselves and in nature. Specifically, Comenius characterized human life—from the mother's womb to grave—as a series of educational stages in which objects from nature would serve as the basis of learning.

In this, he was influenced by the writings of the English statesman Sir Francis Bacon, an early advocate of the inductive method of scientific inquiry. Comenius believed that true knowledge could be found in things as they existed in reality and when one came to understand how they came about. As a result, Comenius urged all people to recognize the interconnections and harmony among philosophical, theological, scientific, social, and political facts and ideas.

That way, one could reconcile three seemingly distinct worlds: the natural, the human, and the divine. Comenius felt that disagreements among religious, scientific, and philosophic enterprises arose because each held only a partial understanding of universal truth—but that all could exist harmoniously through pansophic awareness. Viewing the human mind as infinite in its capacity as the benevolent gift of God , Comenius advocated universal education so that the souls of all people would be enlightened in this fashion.

Through universal education and pedagogy, pansophy would eliminate human prejudice and lead to human perfection—a state of being that God had intended for man. Comenius found fault with many of the educational practices of his day. In particular, he disapproved of the scholastic tradition of studying grammar and memorizing texts. He lamented the haphazard and severe teaching methods in european schools, which tended to diminish student interest in learning.

Finally, comenius felt that all children—whether male or female, rich or poor, gifted or mentally challenged—were entitled to a full education, and he regretted that only a privileged few received formal schooling. For comenius, all of these educational shortcomings were especially urgent, as they hindered mankind's progress to the new millennium. As a result, he attempted to remedy these problems by authoring a number of textbooks and educational treatises.

Perhaps Comenius's most familiar work is the Great Didactic, which he originally wrote in As Comenius held the conviction that pansophy was necessary for the spiritual salvation of humankind, he reasoned that a good man a rational being who understood God through nature , and ultimately a good society, could only be created if all people acquired encyclopedic knowledge. In this classic of Czech literature, man finds true happiness in mystical union with Christ. Because of persecution, the Brethren were forced to leave Bohemia in Comenius went to Leszno, Poland, where his position as corector of the Brethren's school led him to become interested in educational reform.

Many of the educational ideas expressed in his Didactica magna ; The Great Didactic were developed during this period. Among the reforms that he advocated were gentler discipline; use of the vernacular instead of Latin in the primary schools; and free, universal, compulsory education for both sexes and all social classes. His book Janua linguarum reserata ; The Gate of Languages Unlocked revolutionized the teaching of Latin and helped establish his reputation throughout Europe as an educational reformer.

Elected a bishop of his church in , Comenius expressed his great interest in Christian unity and was conspicuous in the 17th century for his ecumenical beliefs. His early education as a young man had been in a Latin school, which was the classic system of the day. His reform of the existing education systems called for a revolution in methods of teaching calling for approaches that would allow learning to be rapid, pleasant, and thorough.

The way children naturally learned needed to be carefully considered rather than the mindless memorization of texts without understanding the material taught. Teaching in Latin was seen as necessary, but rather than focusing only on grammar, learning about useful facts was proposed.

Comenius wrote Didactica Magna The Great Didactic , published in , which laid out his educational ideas. This book was well received throughout Europe and was subsequently translated into several languages. Through the success of the book, he became well known throughout Europe. He was invited to England to establish a college in to institute his program of educational reform with the hope of reforming human society. His notable essay, The Way of Light , which set out his program, was well received; however, when the English Civil War broke out in , he was forced once again to move.

He accepted an offer from the government of Sweden to help reform the schools there by writing a series of textbooks.