Comenius and the Beginnings of Educational Reform

by W. S. Monroe

Through Hartlib’s influence the English Parliament invited Comenius to England. This was in the summer of 1641. Comenius himself may be permitted to tell how all this came about: “After my Pansophia had been published and dispersed through the various countries of Europe, many learned men approved of the object and plan of the work, but despaired of its ever being accomplished by one man alone, and therefore advised that a college of learned men should be instituted to carry it into effect. Mr. Samuel Hartlib, who had forwarded its publication in England, labored earnestly in this matter, and endeavored by every possible means to bring together for this purpose a number of intellectual men. And at length, having found one or two, he invited me with many strong entreaties. As my friends consented to my departure, I proceeded to London, and arrived there on the autumnal equinox (September the 22d) in the year 1641, and then learned that I had been called thither by an order of the Parliament. But, in consequence of the king having gone to Scotland, the Parliament had been dismissed for three months, and, consequently, I had to winter in London.”

His friends meanwhile examined with more detail his educational views and encouraged him to elaborate his views in a tract, which he named Via lucis, or the way of light. This, as he himself says, was “a national disquisition as to the manner in which wisdom—the intellectual law of minds—may at length toward the evening of the world be felicitously diffused through all minds in all nations.”

Around Comenius Hartlib soon collected a group of thoughtful men interested in the Moravian reformer’s views; and together we may suppose they discussed at length the larger educational problems already formulated by Comenius in his published writings. The group included, besides Hartlib, Mr. John Pell, a mathematician of acknowledged repute; John Milton, the poet and educational writer; Theodor Haak, the expositor of philosophic systems; John Wilkins, the agricultural enthusiast; John Durie, the advocate of evangelical unity; Thomas Farnaby, the schoolmaster at Sevenoaks and one of the English editors of Comenius’ Janua; and probably the American Winthrop, later governor of Connecticut, who was wintering in London. He was delighted with London and the people he met. Writing to friends in Lissa, he says: “I live as a friend among friends; though not so many visit me as would if they knew that I could speak English, or if they had more confidence in their own Latin.”

When Parliament finally convened “and my presence being known,” writes Comenius, “I was commanded to wait until after some important business having been transacted, a commission should be issued to certain wise and learned Englishmen to hear me and be informed of my plan. As an earnest, moreover, of their intentions, they communicated to me their purpose to assign to us a college with revenues, whence some men of learning and industry selected from any nation might be honorably sustained either for a certain number of years or in perpetuity. The Savoy in London, and beyond London, Winchester, and again near the city, Chelsea, were severally mentioned, and inventories of the latter and its revenues were communicated to me; so that nothing seemed more certain than that the designs of Lord Bacon to open a universal college of all nations, devoted solely to the advancement of the sciences, were now in way of being carried into effect.”

Comenius had assumed that when the call to England came to him at Lissa, it simply represented a private movement backed by Hartlib and other influential Englishmen; and he expresses himself in terms of delighted surprise upon arriving in London to find that he had been summoned thither by the Parliament of the realm. The parliamentary sanction of this summons has never been corroborated. Professor Masson made the attempt, but was unable to find in the Lords’ or Commons’ Journal for the years 1641 and 1642 any traces of communication between Comenius and the Parliament of which he speaks. He admits that there may be such corroborative evidence, since the indexes for these years are incomplete. There are, however, no good and sufficient reasons for doubting the word of Comenius in this matter.

There are traces at this period of parliamentary dissatisfaction with current English education, and more particularly with university education in England. Professor Masson thus states the matter: “There had for some time been a tradition of dissatisfaction with the existing state of the universities and the great public schools. In especial, Bacon’s complaints and suggestions in the second book of his De Augmentis had sunk into thoughtful minds. That the universities, by persistence in old and outworn methods, were not in full accord with the demands and needs of the age; that their aims were too professional and particular, and not sufficiently scientific and general; that the order of studies in them was bad, and some of the studies barren; that there ought to be a bold direction of their endowments and apparatus in the line of experimental knowledge, so as to extract from nature new secrets and sciences for which humanity was panting; that, moreover, there ought to be more fraternity and correspondence among the universities of Europe and some organization of their labors, with a view to mutual illumination and collective advancement:—all these Verulamian speculations, first submitted to King James, were lying here and there in English intellects in watch for an opportunity.”

But the time was not yet come for the reform movement in English education. Ireland was in a state of commotion; two hundred thousand Englishmen had been massacred;[17] the sudden departure of the king from London on the 10th of January, 1642, and the prospect of a prolonged civil war convinced Comenius that it would be useless to tarry longer in England. He informed his friends of his disappointment of his plans. Hartlib was hopeful and urged delay, but a call to Sweden, made four years previous, was renewed at this time, and he left London on the 10th of June, in the year 1642.

Lewis de Geer, a rich Dutch merchant and philanthropist, residing at Nordköping, Sweden, had offered to render him financial aid in working out his educational reforms in Sweden. But de Geer’s notions of reform differed widely from those of the English friends. He was less interested in universal research, the founding of pansophic colleges, and the results of original investigation than Hartlib and the Englishmen. What he wanted was better school-books for the children, rational methods of teaching for the teachers, and some intelligent grading of the schools. The English friends were satisfied with the broad generalities of pansophic learning, the unrealized dreams that were so very near the reformer’s heart; the Dutch merchant would be satisfied with nothing less than concrete applications of theories. There is no doubt that Comenius would have preferred lingering in England or going to some place where his cherished pansophic schemes might be given a hearing. But he was human and had organic needs, and he knew that the liberal remuneration offered him by de Geer would avert poverty even though the realization of his pure and exalted pansophic dream was deferred.

“In the history of great renunciations,” says Mr. Keatinge,[18] “surely none is stranger than this. We have a man little past the prime of life, his brain teeming with magnificent, if somewhat visionary, plans for social reform, a mighty power in the community that shaved his religious ideas, and an object of interest even to those who may have shrugged their shoulders at his occasional want of balance. Suddenly he flings his projects to the winds, consigns his darling plans to the dustheap of unrealizable ideas, and retires to a small seaside town—not to meditate, not to give definite form to latent conceptions or to evolve new ones, not to make preparation for the dazzling of intellectual Europe with an octavo of fantastic philanthropy or of philosophic mysticism, but—to write school-books for the little boys in Swedish schools.”