Thus the school, with its specially prepared teachers and accommodations, with its ample mental nourishment, its pleasant, healthy, and stimulating environment, its regular systematic work, and equipment especially adapted to its ends, should become the center for the advancement and propagation of knowledge and the fittest soil for the growth of the young generation. In Comenius’s own words, “As workshops supply manufactured goods, churches supply piety, and law courts justice, why should not schools produce, purify, and multiply the light of wisdom, and distribute it to the whole body of human community?” (2: p. 216). Comenius’s demand upon and hope in the school was great. The school that fulfils its function perfectly is “one which is a true forging-place of men; where the minds of those who learn are illuminated by the light of wisdom, so as to penetrate with ease all that is manifest and all that is secret, where the emotions and desires are brought into harmony with virtue, and where the heart is filled and permeated by divine love, so that all who are handed over to Christian schools to be imbued with true wisdom may be taught to live a heavenly life on earth; in a word, where all men are taught all things thoroughly” (2: p. 228). With this ideal, the reformer naturally found that “hitherto there have been no perfect schools,” and the present state of things is most unsatisfactory. “The method used in instructing the young has generally been so severe that schools have been looked on as terrors for boys and shambles for their intellects, and the greater number of students, having contracted a dislike for learning and for books, have hastened away to the workshops of artificers or to some other occupation.... Piety and virtue, which form the most important element in education, were neglected more than anything else, ... so that for the most part, instead of tractable lambs, fiery wild asses and restive mules were produced; and instead of characters molded to virtue, nothing issued from the schools but a spurious veneer of morality, a fastidious and exotic clothing of culture, and eyes, hands, and feet trained to worldly vanities” (2: pp. 229-230). Even in intellectual culture, which had been almost their sole concern, the result achieved is pitifully poor. “For five, ten, or more years they detained the mind over matters that could be mastered in one. What could have been gently instilled into the intellect, was violently impressed upon it, nay rather stuffed and flogged into it. What might have been placed before the mind plainly and lucidly, was treated of obscurely, perplexedly, and intricately, as if it were a complicated riddle. In addition, ... the intellect was scarcely ever nourished by the actual facts, but was filled with the husks of words, with a windy and parrot-like loquacity, and with the chaff of opinions” (2: pp. 230-231).