But he did more than this. He related virtue and godliness to knowledge.
By knowledge Comenius meant knowledge of nature and of man's relation to
nature. It is this important characteristic of Comenius' educational
system that reveals the direct influence of Bacon and his school. To the
great Verulam he pays reverence for what he owed him, but he owed him
even more than he knew.
In this field of knowledge, the leading characteristic of the
educational system of Comenius is his realism. We have pointed out, in
contradiction of the assumptions of the modern sensationalist school,
that the humanists were in truth realists, and it may be safely said
that there can be no question among competent judges as to the realism
which ought to characterize all rational and sound instruction. The
question rather is as to the field in which the real is to be sought--in
the mind of man, or in external nature. As the former may be called
humanistic-realism, so the latter may be called sense- or
naturalistic-realism. Of the latter, Comenius is the true founder,
although his indebtedness to Ratich was great. Mere acquisition of the
ordered facts of nature, and man's relation to them, was with him the
great aim--if not the sole aim--of all purely intellectual instruction.
And here there necessarily entered the governing idea, encyclopædism or
pansophism. Let all the sciences, he said, be taught in their elements
in all schools, and more fully at each successive stage of the pupil's
progress. It is by knowledge that we are what we are, and the necessary
conclusion from this must be, let all things be taught to all.
It is at this point that many will part company with Comenius. The mind
stored with facts, even if these be ordered facts, will not necessarily
be much raised in the scale of humanity as an intelligence. The natural
powers may be simply overweighted by the process, and the natural
channels of spontaneous reason choked. In education, while our main
business is to promote the growth of moral purpose and of a strong sense
of duty, we have to support these by the discipline of intelligence, and
by training to power and work rather than by information. On the other
hand, only those who are ignorant of the history and the recognized
results of education will wholly abjure realism in the Comenian sense;
but it has to be assigned its own place, and nothing more than this, in
the education of a human being. The sum of the matter seems to be this,
that while a due place in all education is to be assigned to
sense-realistic studies, especially in the earlier years of family and
school life, the humanistic agencies must always remain the most potent
in the making of a man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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