(1592-1670) theologian, educator
Johann Amos Comenius was born in Nivnice, Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic. His parents died when he was 12 years old. Four years later, he was sent to the Brethren’s school at Prerov, Moravia, and encouraged to pursue a career in the Protestant ministry. In 1613 he attended the University of Heidelberg, where he was influenced by the works of Francis bacon and the Protestant mil-lennialists, who worked to achieve salvation on Earth through science and good works.
The beginning of the Thirty Years’ War forced Comenius, who was by this time a Protestant minister, to go into hiding. While in hiding, his wife and two children died of the plague. This tragedy, along with the religious intolerance of the Austrian rulers, led him to write the classic religious allegory, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart (1618), in which he voices his worldly despair and spiritual consolation.
Six years later, Comenius moved to Leszno, Poland, where he published his two famous educational texts, The Gates of Languages Unlocked (1631) and The Great Didactic (1637). The first is a Latin instructional text written in both Czech and Latin. The idea of learning Latin through a comparison with the vernacular became very popular, and Comenius’s book was translated into most European and Asian languages. The Great Didactic is a text on educational theory in which Comenius advocates full-time schooling for all children and the teaching of native and European cultures.
In 1641 Comenius was invited to England to establish a school of social reform, but his plans were interrupted by the outbreak of the English Civil War. He then moved to Sweden, where he developed a series of textbooks modeled on his educational theory. When the Thirty Years’ War ended in 1648, Comenius returned to Poland and was named a bishop of the Brethren’s Unity Church in Leszno.
In 1652 he moved to Amsterdam, where he spent the rest of his life writing and refining his educational treatises. He is recognized for his internationalism and educational reforms that shaped much of the modern system of education in Germany.
English Versions of Works by Johann Amos Comenius
Selections. Translated by Iris Urwin, with Introduction by Jean Piaget. Paris: UNESCO, 1957.
The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius. Translated by M. W. Keatinge. London: A. and C. Black, 1921.
Works about Johann Amos Comenius
Murphy, Daniel. Comenius: A Critical Reassessment of His Life and Work. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1995.
Sadler, John Edward. J. A. Comenius and the Concept of Universal Education. London: Allen and Unwin, 1966.
Spinka, Matthew. John Amos Comenius: That Incomparable Moravian. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943.
