His Educational Influence

pated much

although, be

pedagogy,

cause of charlatanism, inexperience,

and the op

position of

others, he

failed to

carry out his

principles.

Thus Ratich not only helped shape some of the best Ratich anticimethods for teaching languages, but he also anticipated of modern many of the main principles of modern pedagogy. In carrying out his ideas, however, he was uniformly unsuccessful. This was somewhat due to his charlatan method of presentation, but more because of errors in his principles, his want of training and experience as a teacher, and the impatience, jealousy, and conservatism of others. He must have been regarded by his contemporaries in general as a complete failure, whenever they contrasted his promises with his performances. Nevertheless, it is clear that he stirred up considerable thought and had a wide influence. He won a great many converts to his principles, and, through the texts and treatises written as a result of the movement he stimulated, his ideas were largely perpetuated and expanded. In the next generation came Comenius, who carried out practically all the principles of Ratich more fully, and thus, in a way, the German innovator, unpractical as he was, became a sort of spiritual ancestor to Pestalozzi, Froebel, and Herbart.

SUPPLEMENTARY READING

I. SOURCE

RICHTER, A. Ratichianische Studien (Pts. 9 and 12 of Neudrücke Pädagogischer Schriften).

II. AUTHORITIES

*ADAMSON, J. W. Pioneers of Modern Education. Pp. 31-43. BARNARD, H. American Journal of Education. Vol. V, pp. 229–

256. *BARNARD, H.

BROWNING, O.

German Teachers and Educators. Pp. 319-346.
Educational Theories. Chap. IV.

COMPAYRÉ, G.

History of Pedagogy. Pp. 121-122.

*QUICK, R. H.

Educational Reformers. Chap. IX.

CHAPTER IV

COMENIUS AND HIS GREAT DIDACTIC

Jan Amos Komensky (1592-1671), better known by his Latinized name of Comenius, was born at Nivnitz, a village of Moravia. He was, by religious inheritance, a devoted adherent of the Protestant sect called Moravian Brethren.1 While he became bishop of the Moravians, and devoted many of his writings to religion or theological polemics, this does not concern us here, except as it affected his attitude as an educational reformer and a sense realist.

The Education and Earliest Work of Comenius

was trained in a Latin

In his schooling, possibly as the result of careless Comenius guardianship of his inheritance, Comenius did not come to the study of Latin, the all-important subject school and at in his day, until he was sixteen. This delay must,

1 The Moravian or Bohemian Church, officially known as Unitas Fratrum, is generally considered Lutheran in doctrine, but its religious descent goes back of Luther's time to the Bohemian martyr, Huss, and it has always preserved a separate organization. There are now three "provinces' of Moravians, the German, British, and American. They number in all about thirty-five thousand members, of whom some twenty thousand are in the United States.

Herborn.

He then

taught at Prerau and wrote his

Easier Grammar.

In the Janua, the first of his remarkable

however, be regarded as most fortunate for education, as his maturity enabled him to perceive the amount of time then wasted upon grammatical complications and other absurdities in teaching languages, and was instrumental in causing him to undertake an improvement of method. After his course in the Latin school, Comenius spent a couple of years in higher education at the Lutheran College of Herborn in the duchy of Nassau,'{where he went to prepare for the ministry of his denomination, and at the University of Heidelberg. Then, as he was still rather young for the cares of the pastorate, he taught for four years (1614-1618) in the school at Prerau, Moravia. Here he soon made his first attempt at simplifying the teaching of Latin by the production of a work called Grammatica Facilioris Præcepta ('Precepts of Easier Grammar'). Next (1618-1621) he became pastor at Fulneck. Then, after a series of persecutions resulting from the Thirty Years' War, during which he and his fellow pastors were driven from pillar to post, he settled in 1627 at the Polish town of Leszno.2

The Janua Linguarum and Other Texts of the Series This place became the center from which most of his great contributions to education emanated. During his

1 The University of Prague, to which Comenius would naturally have gone, was at this time in the control of the Utraquists, a Hussite sect opposed to the Moravians.

2 This town, now called Lissa, is a part of Prussia.

residence of fourteen years as rector of the Moravian
gymnasium here, he accomplished many reforms in the
schools, and began to embody his ideas in a series of
remarkable textbooks. The first of these works was pro-
duced in 1631, and has generally been known by the name
of Janua Linguarum Reserata ('Gate of Languages Un-
locked'). It was intended as an introductory book to
the study of Latin,1 and consisted of an arrangement into
sentences of several thousand Latin words for the most
familiar objects and ideas. The Latin was printed on
the right-hand side of the page, and on the left was given
a translation in the vernacular. By this means the pupil
obtained a grasp of all ordinary knowledge and at the
same time a start in his Latin vocabulary. In writing
this text, Comenius may have been somewhat influenced
by Ratich, the criticism of whose methods by the pro-
fessors at Giessen 2 he had read while at Herborn,3 but he
seems to have been more specifically indebted both for
his method and the felicitous name of his book to a
Jesuit known as Bateus, who had written a similar work.
1 In the first edition it was called Janua Lingua Latina Reserata.
2 See pp. 20 f.

8 As, however, Ratich had failed to answer the letter of inquiry he wrote him from Leszno, Comenius must have largely worked out the plan independently.

Batty or Bateus was an Irishman, although at the College of Salamanca in Spain. Comenius makes acknowledgments to him in the Janua, but says his ideas had been outlined some time before his attention was called to the book of the Jesuit father.

series of texts

on the study

of Latin, he was influ

enced by Ratich and

Bateus.