The success of these textbooks was immediate and very great. Within a short time after the publication of the Janua it had been translated into Flemish, Bohemian, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latin, Polish, Spanish, and Swedish, as well as into Arabic, Mongolian, Russian, and Turkish. The Orbis Pictus was an even greater success. [8] It went through many editions, in many languages; stood without a competitor in Europe for a hundred and fifteen years; and was used as an introductory textbook for nearly two hundred years. An American edition was brought out in New York City, as late as 1810.
[Illustration: FIG. 127. PART OF A PAGE FROM A LATIN-ENGLISH EDITION OF
THE "VESTIBULUM">[
Thousands of parents, who knew nothing of Comenius and cared nothing for his educational ideas, bought the book for their children because they found that they liked the pictures and learned the language easily from it. [9]
PLACE AND INFLUENCE OF COMENIUS. Comenius stands in the history of education in a position of commanding importance. He introduces the whole modern conception of the educational process, and outlines many of the modern movements for the improvement of educational procedure. What Petrarch was to the revival of learning, what Wycliffe was to religious thought, what Copernicus was to modern science, and what Bacon and Descartes were to modern philosophy, Comenius was to educational practice and thinking (R. 222). The germ of almost all eighteenth- and nineteenth- century educational theory is to be found in his work, and he, more than any one before him and for at least two centuries after him, made an earnest effort to introduce the new science studies into the school. Far more liberal than his Lutheran or Calvinistic or Anglican or Catholic contemporaries, he planned his school for the education of youth in religion and learning and to fit them for the needs of a modern world. Unlike the textbooks of his time, and for more than a century afterward, his were free from either sectarian bigotry or the intense and gloomy atmosphere of the age.
Yet Comenius lived at an unfortunate period in the history of human progress. The early part of the seventeenth century was not a time when an enthusiastic and aggressive and liberal-minded reformer could expect much of a hearing anywhere in western Europe. The shock of the contest into which western Christendom had been plunged by the challenge of Luther had been felt in every corner of Europe, and the culmination of a century of warfare was then raging, with all the bitterness and brutality that a religious motive develops. Christian Europe was too filled with an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust and hatred to be in any mood to consider reforms for the improvement of the education of mankind. As a result the far-reaching changes in method formulated by Comenius made but slight impression on his contemporaries; his attempt to introduce scientific studies awakened suspicion, rather than interest; and the new method which he formulated in his Great Didactic was ignored and the book itself was forgotten for centuries. His great influence on educational progress was through the reform his textbooks worked in the teaching of Latin, and the slow infiltration into the schools of the scientific ideas they contained. As a result, many of the fundamentally sound reforms for which he stood had to be worked out anew in the nineteenth century. It is sad to contemplate how far our western world might have been advanced in its educational organization and scientific progress, by the close of the eighteenth century, had it been in a mood to receive and utilize the reforms in aims and methods, and to accept the new scientific subject-matter, proposed and worked out by this far-sighted Moravian teacher. Religious bigotry has, in all lands and ages, proved itself one of the most serious of all obstacles in the path of human progress.
IV. REALISM AND THE SCHOOLS
THE VERNACULAR SCHOOLS. The ideas for which the realists just described had stood were adopted in the people's schools but slowly, and came only after long waiting. The final incorporation of science instruction into elementary education did not come until the nineteenth century, and then was an outgrowth of the reform work of Pestalozzi on the one hand, and the new social, political, economic, and industrial forces of a modern world on the other.
The Peace of Westphalia (1648), which closed a century of bitter and vindictive religious warfare, was followed by another century of hatred, suspicion, and narrow religious intolerance and reaction. All parties now adopted an extremely conservative attitude in matters of religion and education, and the protection of orthodoxy became the chief purpose of the school. Reading, religion, a little counting and writing, and, in Teutonic lands, music, came to constitute the curriculum of such elementary vernacular schools as had come to exist, and the religious Primer and the Bible became the great school textbooks. The people were poor, much of Europe was impoverished and depopulated as a result of long-continued religious strife, the common people still occupied a very low social position, there were as yet no qualified teachers, and no need for general education aside from religion. Still more, during more than a thousand years the Church had established the tradition of providing free education, and when the governing authorities of the States which turned to Protestantism had taken from the Church both the opportunity to continue the schools and the wealth with which to maintain them, they were seldom willing to tax themselves to set up institutions to continue the work formerly done gratis by the Church. In consequence, regardless of Protestant educational theory as to the need for general education, but little progress in providing vernacular schools was made during the whole of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Here and there in Teutonic lands, however, the new studies found an occasional patron. In 1619 schools were organized for the little Duchy of Weimar (p. 317) by a pupil of Ratke, and sense realism was given a place in them. The schoolmaster, Andreas Reyher, who in 1642 drew up the Schule Methodus "the actual title of that book was 'Schulmethodus" for Duke Ernest of Saxe-Gotha and Altenburg, was familiar with the work of both Ratke and Comenius, and made provision for instruction in "the natural and useful sciences" (R. 163) for Duke Ernest's children. Here and there a few other attempts to provide schools and add instruction in the new Realien were made. The number of such attempts was not large, but their work was influential, and as a result vernacular schools and science instruction finally became established among German-speaking peoples before they did in any other land.
THE SECONDARY SCHOOLS. The influence of Milton's Tractate on the non- conformist Academies of England has been traced, and the transfer of the idea of instruction in the new mathematical, scientific, literary, historical, and political subjects to the new American Academies has been mentioned. That these new studies also entered into the education of a gentleman in England and France, under the private-tutor and the courtly- academy system, and were copied from the French and constituted a large part of the instruction organized for the Ritterakademieen of the numerous court cities in German lands, has also been mentioned. In both England and France such private instruction exerted but little influence on the existing Latin grammar schools, and in consequence the schools of both countries remained largely unchanged in direction and purpose until the second half of the nineteenth century. In German lands the Ritterakademieen idea experienced a further development, which proved to be of large importance for the future of German education.