Comenius

Context

Jonathan Rowson:

"John Amos Comenius ... lived between 1592 and 1670, when the pre-modern world of feudalism, kingdoms, and hegemonic religion had not quite died and the modern world of trade, commerce, and nation states was just being born. Comenius’ world was in crisis in the original sense of being at a turning point, where the meaning and direction of collective life is momentarily up for grabs. We are in a crisis of precisely this kind again today."

(https://systems-souls-society.com/education-must-make-history-again/)

Discussion

Zachary Stein:

"John Amos Comenius (1592-1670), arguably the greatest educational thinker humanity has ever known, lived in a dynamic and transformational historical epoch—a time between worlds. During his life the reign of religious aristocracies climaxed, were exhausted, and gave way to the birth of the modern capitalist world system.[5] In this context he articulated the difference between education that perpetuates failing social systems and education that transforms failing social systems into something new, for the sake of humanity.

The educational system envisioned by Comenius was an attempt to define a new paideia. Paideia is a Greek word meaning roughly educational paradigm—the totality of a society’s ideas, institutions, and practices concerning intergenerational transmission. Comenius envisioned a planetary paideia that was integrative of science and religion, while also being universal, including all peoples regardless of sex, creed, race, or nationality.

Comenius’ vision would directly inspire the creation of institutions pivotal to what has become known as the Western Enlightenment. This now obscure philosopher of education carried a bright torch through the gauntlet of wars and inquisitions between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. His vision of transformative education would eventually change the very face of the emerging world system.

Comenius’ story includes the eventual betrayal and forgetting of his vision as modernity reached maturity. The reason to study Comenius is to see what happens when education makes history, for better and for worse. This story, as I tell it here, also focuses on the historical epoch in which Comenius lived, specifically the “metahistorical patterns” that were in play, which reveal great similarities between his time and our own.

I have tried to tell a carefully condensed story here. A great deal of detail is lacking, with only some of the fascinating subplots addressed in the endnotes. When I first discovered this story, I experienced déjà vu. We are once again tasked with countering social breakdown resulting from information technologies by means of educational innovation.

n 1957 UNESCO held a conference to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the publication of John Amos Comenius’ Opera Didactica Omina (1657).[6] This four-volume work, edited and compiled by Comenius towards the end of his life, contains wisdom from over thirty years of educational reform efforts throughout Europe. The first volume, The Great Didactic, would become one of the most influential and revolutionary educational books ever published, containing perhaps the first comprehensive “modern” educational theory. It had curricula for empirical science as well as religion, an age-graded school organization, and suggestions on making materials for every ability across every subject. Overall, the approach was student-centered, focusing on fostering natural curiosity, observational skills, and a civilized cosmopolitan ethos.

All of these were incredibly revolutionary ideas at the time, and this is just a partial list of innovations found in the book. School masters reading Comenius’ books in the 1660s would have been familiar with other methods, such as the use of brutal physical punishments (akin to torture) set alongside treacherously abstract lessons in ancient languages. Comenius’ call for humane methods of education was literally 300 years ahead of its time. Physical punishment for poor academic performance was practiced widely in so-called “modern” nation states up until the 1960s (and it is still practiced in some households and private schools).

The Great Didactic was published during the last decade of Comenius’ life, after he had found refuge in Amsterdam during a time of chaos and violence. Comenius had, in fact, settled into what was becoming the new center of the emerging world-system, and he dedicated his educational magnum opus to the Dutch East India Company. The economic and logistical organization of the Dutch East India Company was as radical a departure from the feudal economic regimes as Comenius’ vision of education was from feudalistic forms of schooling. Below I discuss the ethical complexity accompanying the birth of modernity, as the shadow of colonialism hangs over all of the first “modern” innovations. Three centuries later, when Jean Piaget would head efforts by UNSECO to resuscitate the memory of Comenius, the long-term results of capitalism and other “modern” innovations had created nationalistic school systems falling drastically short of the potentials he had outlined in the 17th century.

The story I tell here is of a path not taken for education and society at the dawn of the modern era. Comenius had aligned with the future direction of the world-system, seeing in science and capital forms of social organization that transcended the dynamics of disintegrating feudal and religious political organizations. As I discuss below, he worked to show these new powers a way to harness their innovations to undergird an education-centric social system, one that would place human development and the free flow of information at the center of social life on a global scale. Fueled by a mystical faith in the coming of a new world, Comenius courageously promoted a vision for a planetary paideia.

Comenius lived and worked in contexts of extreme opposition and danger. Ultimately his vision was betrayed by the very powers he invested with its actualization. Capital and the nation state took many of the key ideas in his system, especially those useful in upgrading and expanding school bureaucracies and improving the reach of public education as part of building national economies.

Although many readers will likely have not heard of Comenius, his reputation precedes him. Even before the final publication of his great education works in 1657, he was invited by monarchs to work on entirely reforming the educational systems of the English, Swedish, and Dutch. He fielded requests from many other countries, including in the Islamic world, and from what were then the American Colonies. He was invited to be one of the first presidents of Harvard; he declined.[7]

Comenius was also the author of Janua linguarum reserata (The Doors of Language Unlocked), which is by far the greatest language textbook of all time, being reissued and in circulation until the end of the 19th century (close to 300 years). The same is true of his Orbitus Pictus (The World in Pictures), which applied the novel use of print technologies to create a language textbook that was also the first picture book for children and young adults. These books were used to teach Latin all over the world and were written using an unprecedented innovation where a picture was followed by two columns, one describing the picture in a native language, the other with the same description in Latin.

As simple as this may seem now, it was a true innovation in the use of print technology. This innovation signals one of the many ways that Comenius was adapting to a world that was rapidly changing. He put fundamentally new technology to use in a profoundly revolutionary way. Between the years between 1650 and 1890, Comenius’ books could be found almost everywhere, having been translated into Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and all European languages. To that point in history there may have been no more radical innovation in educational technology. These books made Comenius known all over the world.

Comenius was inspired by what Marshall McLuhan called the Gutenberg Galaxy, specifically the impact of having the Bible printed and available in many languages. The rapidly expanding world of printed books was changing the face of Europe, with the Protestant Reformation (1517-1648) being one of the main outcomes. A major part of Comenius’ work was done while serving as the last Bishop of a small Protestant sect known as the Bohemian Brethren, sometimes called the Unity.

Comenius was born into the Brethren, where his father had been an important figure. The Brethren were a small mystically oriented group that was systematically persecuted by both Catholics and Protestants for their views. Their views included the idea that there should be peace between Catholics and Protestants and peace among all sects of Protestants. Indeed, there should be peace among all religions, claimed the Brethren. Keep in mind that this was a time of tremendous religious conflict and intersectarian violence. While calls for peace were not unheard of, the sophistication of the Brethren’s theological and political thinking, thanks in large part to Comenius’ religious writings, was unique in the period.

The only thing comparable during the time would be the writings associated with the “Rosicrucian furor” that swept Europe in the lead-up to the Thirty Years’ War. It is likely that the Brethren may have been an inspiration to the writers behind a series of provocative philosophical manifestos that sparked the furor.[8] The most famous was Johannes Valentinus Andreae’s The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosicrucian, which told the story of a secret brotherhood of mystic healers, working to unite humanity through wisdom, science, and faith. It is known that Andreae and Comenius were in touch, and that Andreae had a major impact on Comenius, after living in the same area of Bohemia and interacting with the same group of intellectuals around the “Winter King” of Bohemia.

In a much-analyzed historical moment, this was the place (Bohemia), time (1619-1620), and intrigue (Rosicrucian rumors) that set off the Thirty Years’ War. After these fateful events, Comenius, the Brethren, and a large number of Protestant refugees left their homelands in Moravia and Bohemia never to return. For the rest of his life Comenius would travel Europe without a home, under the sponsorship of various powerful families and politicians, always seeking to seize the historical moment to undertake radical reforms of education (very much like one of the itinerate world reforming Rosicrucians in Andreae’s writings).

Of course, it was not just the writings of religious and philosophical radicals that fermented the tumult of the Thirty Years’ War. The whole of Europe came to be at war with itself—the first “world war” to encompass the entirety of the then still young capitalist world system. The leaders of all nations were in confusion; there was a generalized educational crisis impacting all strata of the population. This was a time between world systems.

In his classic historical account of Comenius, Matthew Spinka paints a picture of a time when new technological and economic changes were outpacing the thinking of the leaders of the ancient regimes.[9] New thinking was needed, especially thinking that could integrate the emerging scientific paradigm, as well as the immanent democracy and economic revolutions that were being given voice in the newly emerging public sphere of print media. A unifying vision is what the Rosicrucian writings offered. Comenius would echo them with his totalizing vision of educational reform and integrative world philosophy.

The aforementioned picture books and textbooks were felt by Comenius to be only a practical necessity. At times the demand for them became a distraction from what he took to be his life’s work: the elaboration of pansophy, a system of universal wisdom that could serve as an integrative world philosophy.

The notion of pansophy itself can be found in several Rosicrucian texts, where it represents a sophisticated Neoplatonic synthesis of alchemy, Christology, Utopianism, and Baconian natural science. But Comenius was cutting past the fictional scenarios of the Rosicrucian ideologies and suggesting something that was intended to be taken literally. Comenius was not offering a Utopian allegory, but concrete utopian theorizing setting a trajectory for actual reforms. He was trying to turn the famous Rosicrucian “invisible college” into something visible. As discussed further below, this places one of the most important educational thinkers in history directly in the lineage of streams of esoteric Christianity, Renaissance alchemy, and Kabbalistic divination.[10]

Comenius’ pansophic work presents a theory of everything woven together right as modernity began to fracture the value spheres and disciplines. It is an attempt at an integration of all knowledge into a single system, including the new empirical sciences, as well as religious aspects of human culture. Importantly, pansophy provides for the design of educational configurations capable of catalyzing a universal reform of all human institutions.

The pinnacle of this vision is the Pansophic College or Temple of Light. Also called the School of Schools, this organization was to act like a planetary hub or clearinghouse for knowledge, running quality control, printing the latest findings (and those that had been disproven or changed), while also working on the integration of religions with science and politics. All knowledge was to be made available through a universal network of printers and schools that “taught all things to all people in all ways,” which was one of the catch-phrases that Comenius coined.

This vision was particularly inspiring to a group in England, which included Samuel Hartlieb, who would go on to be one of the key players in the founding of The Royal Society. Hartlieb asked Comenius to come to England to present his plans before the crown and the parliament. There was sufficient support, but the timing of the meeting coincided with the outbreak of the English Civil War, so Comenius left for Sweden, where he had been asked to reform their schools.

Hartlieb’s group continued to work on the basic ideas in Comenius’ vision. After the civil war subdued, and with much intrigue and planning, this group created The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. The creation of this society in 1660 generally marks the beginning of “the Enlightenment.” The vision for this society is to be found in Comenius’ pansophic blueprints, which were a concretization of the Utopian schemes found in works such as Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, as well as in the works associated with the Rosicrucian movement.

One more example must feature in this brief account of Comenius’ work. René Descartes had meetings with Comenius, and allegedly it was Comenius who encouraged him to publish his famous meditations. Descartes himself was so impressed by Comenius that he wrote a large work on Comenius’ vision for pansophy, which remains unpublished.[11] This is an almost unbelievable story, given the canonical status of Descartes as one of the founders of modern thought and the relative obscurity of Comenius by contemporary lights. Nevertheless, the story is true, and it is a mostly forgotten fact that during the dawn of the modern era there were other visions for the future of knowledge and society than those that would become known as Cartesian dualism and scientific reductionism.

Despite his fame and influence during his life the legacy of Comenius is complicated. The Thirty Years’ War resulted in an understandable reaction against religion and religious dogma, a sentiment that was merged with the new Enlightenment paradigm of natural science. This reaction towards religion muted the legacy of Comenius. Indeed, Comenius had been a vocal believer in prophets and soothsayers who spoke of a new world emerging and an old one passing away.[12] His theology was superordinate to his empiricism, even as both had a place in his grand vision. Thus, as modernity unfolded, his textbooks flourished while his vision of a pansophic planetary paideia was largely forgotten. Nevertheless, Comenius’ vision was a driver of world historical change, serving as the “underground” and original inspiration for the first modern educational systems and scientific organizations."

(https://systems-souls-society.com/education-must-make-history-again/)

More information

* Article: * Education Must Make History Again. By Zachary Stein. Perspectiva. January 2022.

URL = https://systems-souls-society.com/education-must-make-history-again/

“Times between worlds—liminal epochs—always involve profound educational crises, which can rapidly cascade into total civilizational breakdowns. The ideal response has been to ‘reboot’ the social structure using an updated educational operating system. The best example from recent history — the last time this happened at scale — is the story I tell in this essay.”