The second grade is the elementary public school. All the children, girls and boys, enter here at six, and leave at twelve. The characteristic of this school is that the instruction there given is in the mother tongue, and this is why Comenius calls it the “common” school, vernacula, a term given by the Romans to the language of the people.
The third grade is represented by the Latin school or gymnasium. Thither are sent the children from twelve to eighteen years of age for whom has been reserved a more complete instruction, such as we would now call secondary instruction.
Finally, to the fourth grade correspond the academies, that is, institutions of higher instruction, opened to young men from eighteen to twenty-four years of age.
The child, if he is able, will traverse these four grades in succession; but, in the thought of Comenius, the studies should be so arranged in the elementary schools, that in leaving them, the pupil shall have a general education which makes it unnecessary for him to go farther, if his condition in life does not destine him to pursue the courses of the Latin School.
“We pursue,” says Comenius, “a general education, the teaching to all men of all the subjects of human concern.... The purpose of the people’s school shall be that all children of both sexes, from the tenth to the twelfth or the thirteenth year, may be instructed in that knowledge which is useful during the whole of life.”
This was an admirable definition of the purpose of the primary school. A thing not less remarkable is that Comenius establishes an elementary school in each village:—
“There should be a maternal school in each family; an elementary school in each district; a gymnasium in each city; an academy in each kingdom, or even in each considerable province.”
140. Elementary Initiation into All the Studies.—One of the most novel and most original ideas of the great Slavic educator is the wish that, from the earliest years of his life, the child may acquire some elementary notions of all the sciences that he is to study at a later period. From the cradle, the gaze of the infant, guided by the mother, should be directed to all the objects that surround him, so that his growing powers of reflection will be brought into play in working on these sense intuitions. “Thus, from the moment he begins to speak, the child comes to know himself, and, by his daily experience, certain general and abstract expressions; he comes to comprehend the meaning of the words something, nothing, thus, otherwise, where, similar, different; and what are generalizations and the categories expressed by these words but the rudiments of metaphysics? In the domain of physics, the infant can learn to know water, earth, air, fire, rain, snow, etc., as well as the names and uses of the parts of his body, or at least of the external members and organs. He will take his first lesson in optics in learning to distinguish light, darkness, and the different colors; and in astronomy, in noticing the sun, the moon, and the stars, and in observing that these heavenly bodies rise and set every day. In geography, according to the place where he lives, he will be shown a mountain, a valley, a plain, a river, a village, a hamlet, a city, etc. In chronology, he will be taught what an hour is, a day, a week, a year, summer, winter, yesterday, the day before yesterday, to-morrow, the day after to-morrow, etc. History, such as his age will allow him to conceive, will consist in recalling what has recently passed, in taking account of it, and in noting the part that this one or that has taken in such or such an affair. Arithmetic, geometry, statistics, mechanics, will not remain strangers to him. He will acquire the elements of these sciences in distinguishing the difference between little and much, in learning to count up to ten, in observing that three is more than two; that one added to three makes four; in learning the sense of the words great and small, long and short, wide and narrow, heavy and light; in drawing lines, curves, circles, etc.; in seeing goods measured with a yard-stick; in weighing an object in a balance; in trying to make something or to take it to pieces, as all children love to do.