United States or Gambia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It was the language in which the learned conversed, the language spoken at all Universities, the language of diplomatists and statesmen, the language of scientific treatises. If a man could make the learning of Latin easier, he was adored as a public benefactor. Comenius's Grammar was hailed with delight, as a boon and a blessing to men.
They must build new schools wherever possible, and endeavour to obtain the assistance of godly nobles. We have here the key to the whole of Comenius's career. It is the fashion now with many scholars to divide his life into two distinct parts. On the one hand, they say, he was a Bishop of the Brethren's Church; on the other hand he was an educational reformer.
Not only may he have had to do with the importation of Comenius's Janua Linguarum and the recommendation of that book to such pedagogues as Home and Anchoran; but he was instrumental in extracting from Comenius, while that book and certain appendices to it were in the flush of their first European popularity, a summary of his reserved and more general theories and intentions in the field of Didactics.
With us the method is theory first, practice afterwards; with Comenius the method was practice first, theory afterwards; and the method of Comenius, with modifications, is likely to be the method of the future. But Comenius's greatest educational work was undoubtedly his "Great Didactic," or the "Art of Teaching All Things to All Men."
For the convocation of such a Society there is need of the authority and liberality of some King, or Prince, or Republic, and also of some quiet place, away from crowds, with a Library and other appurtenances." A special part of Comenius's system, better known perhaps at the time of which we write than his system as a whole, was his Method for Teaching Languages.
At this early stage in their history the Moravian refugees at Herrnhut knew absolutely nothing of the institutions of the Bohemian Brethren.84 They had no historical records in their possession; they had not preserved any copies of the ancient laws; they brought no books but hymn-books across the border; and they framed their rules and organized their society before they had even heard of the existence of Comenius's "Account of Discipline."
Jeremy Taylor mourns with him "the strangely hopeful child," who without Comenius's "Janua" and without congruous syntax was fulfilling, had they known it, an appropriate hope, answering a distinctive prophecy, and crowning and closing a separate expectation every day of his five years. Ah! the word "hopeful" seems, to us, in this day, a word too flattering to the estate of man.
Leszno in Poland was Comenius's new refuge. Here again he employed himself in teaching; and here, in a more systematic manner than before, he pursued his speculations on the science of teaching and on improved methods for the acquisition of universal knowledge.
He had not yet read the history of the Brethren, and he had not yet studied Comenius's "Account of Discipline."
As soon as James II. came to the throne, the interest of English Churchmen in the Brethren appears to have waned, and neither William III. nor Queen Anne took any steps on their behalf. And yet the connection of the Brethren with England was not entirely broken. The bond of union was Daniel Ernest Jablonsky. He was Amos Comenius's grandson.
Word Of The Day