With something of the charlatan and the demagogue, Ratich devoted his life to propagating a novel art of teaching, which he called didactics, and to which he attributed marvels. He pretended, by his method of languages, to teach Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, in six months. But nevertheless, out of many strange performances and lofty promises, there issue some thoughts of practical value. The first merit of Ratich was to give the mother tongue, the German language, the precedence over the ancient languages. An English educational writer, Mr. R. H. Quick, in his Essays on Educational Reformers (1874), has thus summed up the essential principles of the pedagogy of Ratich: 1. Everything should be taught in its own time and order, and according to the natural method, in passing from the more easy to the more difficult. 2. Only one thing should be learned at a time. “We do not cook at the same time in one pot, soup, meat, fish, milk, and vegetables.” 3. The same thing should be repeated several times. 4. By means of these frequent repetitions, the pupil will have nothing to learn by heart. 5. All school-books should be written on the same plan. 6. The thing as a whole should be made known before the thing in its details, and the sequence should be from the general to the special. 7. In every case we should proceed by induction and experiment. Ratich especially means by this that we must make an end of mere authority, and of the testimony of the ancients, and must appeal to individual reason. 8. Finally, everything should be learned without coercion. Coercion and the rod are contrary to nature, and disgust the young with study. The human understanding learns with pleasure all that it ought to retain. It does not seem that Ratich knew how to draw from these principles, which, by the way, are not true save under certain corrections, all the happy results that are contained in them. He left to Comenius the glory of applying the new spirit to actual practice.
135. Comenius (1592-1671).—For a long time unknown and unappreciated, Comenius has finally received from our contemporaries the admiration that is due him. Michelet speaks of him with enthusiasm as “that rare genius, that gentle, fertile, universal scholar”;[98] and he calls him the first evangelist of modern pedagogy, Pestalozzi being the second. It is easy to justify this appreciation. The character of Comenius equals his intelligence. Through a thousand obstacles he devoted his long life to the work of popular instruction. With a generous ardor he consecrated himself to infancy. He wrote twenty works and taught in twenty cities. Moreover, he was the first to form a definite conception of what the elementary studies should be. He determined, nearly three hundred years ago, with an exactness that leaves nothing to be desired, the division of the different grades of instruction. He exactly defined some of the essential laws of the art of teaching. He applied to pedagogy, with remarkable insight, the principles of modern logic. Finally, as Michelet has said, he was the Galileo, we would rather say, the Bacon, of modern education.
136. Baconian Inspiration.—The special aims of pedagogy are essentially related to the general aims of science. All progress in science has its corresponding effects on education. When an innovator has modified the laws for the discovery of truth, other innovators appear, who modify, in their turn, the rules for instruction. To a new logic almost necessarily corresponds a new pedagogy.
Now Bacon, at the opening of the seventeenth century, had opened unknown routes to scientific investigation. For the abstract processes of thought, for the barren comparison of propositions and words, in which the whole art of the syllogism consisted, the author of the Novum Organum had substituted the concrete study of reality, the living and fruitful observation of nature. The mechanism of deductive reasoning was replaced by the slow and patient interpretation of facts. It no longer answered to analyze with docile spirit principles that were assumed, right or wrong, as absolute truths; nor to become expert in handling the syllogism, which, like a mill running dry, often produced but little flour. It was now necessary to open the eyes to the contemplation of the universe, and by sense intuition, by observation, by experiment, and by induction, to penetrate its secrets, and determine its laws. It was necessary to ascend, step by step, from the knowledge of the simplest things to the discovery of the most general laws; and, finally, to demand of nature herself to reveal all that the human intelligence, in its solitary meditations, is powerless to discover.
Looking at this subject more closely, this revolution in science, so important from the point of view of speculative inquiry, and destined to change the aspect of the sciences, also contained in itself a revolution in education. For this purpose, all that was needed was to apply to the development of the intelligence and to the communication of knowledge the rules proposed by Bacon for the investigation of truth. The laws of scientific induction might become the laws for the education of the soul. No more setting out with abstract principles, imposed by authority; but facts intuitively apprehended, gathered by observation and verified by experiment; the order of nature faithfully followed; a cautious progression from the simplest and most elementary ideas to the most difficult and most complex truths; the knowledge of things instead of an analysis of words,—such was to be the character of the new system of instruction. In other terms, it was possible to make the child follow, in order to lead him to know and to comprehend the capitalized truths that constitute the basis of elementary instruction, the same method that Bacon recommended to scholars for the discovery of unknown truths.[99]
It is this conversion, or, as we might say, this translation, of the maxims of the Baconian logic into pedagogical rules, that Comenius attempted, and this is why he has been called “the father of the intuitive method.” He was nourished, intellectually, by the reading of Bacon, whom he resembles, not only in his ideas, but also in his figurative and often allegorical language. Even the title of one of his books, Didactica Magna, recalls the title of Bacon’s Instauratio Magna.
137. The Life of Comenius.—To know Comenius and the part he played in the seventeenth century, to appreciate this grand educational character, it would be necessary to begin by relating his life; his misfortunes; his journeys to England, where Parliament invoked his aid; to Sweden, where the Chancellor Oxenstiern employed him to write manuals of instruction; especially his relentless industry, his courage through exile, and the long persecutions he suffered as a member of the sect of dissenters, the Moravian Brethren; and the schools he founded at Fulneck, in Bohemia, at Lissa and at Patak, in Poland. But it would require too much of our space to follow in its incidents and catastrophes that troubled life, which, in its sudden trials, as in the firmness that supported them, recalls the life of Pestalozzi.[100]
138. His Principal Works.—Comenius wrote a large number of books in Latin, in German, and in Czech; but of these only a few are worthy to engage the attention of the educator. In his other works he allows himself to go off on philosophic excursions, and to indulge in mystic reveries, led by his ardor to find what he called pansophia, wisdom or universal knowledge. In this wilderness of publications destined to oblivion, we shall notice only three works, which contain the general principles of the pedagogy of Comenius, and the applications which he has made of his method:—