When we come to consider Comenius' method as applied specially to
language, we recognize its general truth, and the teachers of Europe and
America will now be prepared to pay it the homage of theoretical
approval at least. To admire, however, his own attempt at working out
his linguistic method is impossible, unless we first accept his
encyclopædism. The very faults with which he charged the school
practices of the time are simply repeated by himself in a new form. The
boy's mind is overloaded with a mass of words--the name and qualities of
everything in heaven, on the earth, and under the earth. It was
impossible that all these things, or even pictures of them, could be
presented to sense, and hence his books must have inflicted a heavy
burden on the merely verbal memory of boys. We want children to grow
into knowledge, not to swallow numberless facts made up into boluses.
Again, the amount that was to be acquired within a given time was beyond
the youthful capacity. Any teacher will satisfy himself of this who will
simply count the words and sentences in the _Janua_ and _Orbis_ of
Comenius, and then try to distribute these over the schooltime allowed
them. Like all reformers, Comenius was oversanguine. I do not overlook
the fact that command over the Latin tongue as a vehicle of expression
was necessary to those who meant to devote themselves to professions and
to learning, and that Comenius had his justification for introducing a
mass of vocables now wholly useless to the student of Latin. But even
for his own time, Comenius, under the influence of his encyclopædic
passion, overdid his task. His real merits in language-teaching lie in
the introduction of the principle of graduated reading-books, in the
simplification of Latin grammar, in his founding instruction in foreign
tongues on the vernacular, and in his insisting on method in
instruction. But these were great merits, too soon forgotten by the dull
race of schoolmasters, if, indeed, they were ever fully recognized by
them till quite recent times.
Finally, Comenius' views as to the inner organization of a school were
original, and have proved themselves in all essential respects correct.
The same may be said of his scheme for the organization of a state
system--a scheme which is substantially, _mutatis mutandis_, at this
moment embodied in the highly developed system of Germany.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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