The Use of the Art of Teaching. Motto of ERA21 #04/2024

Jan Amos Komenský

That the art of teaching be placed on a proper foundation is to the advantage—

1. Of parents, who up to this time have for the most part been uncertain how much to expect from their chlidren. They hires tutors, besought them, strove to win them over by gifts, changed them, just as often in vain as with any result. But now that the method of teaching has been reasoned out with unerring accuracy, it will, with the assistance of God, be impossible that the desired result should not follow.

2. Of schoolmasters, the greater number of whom have been quite ignorant of their art, and who used therefore to wear themselves out when they wished to fulfil their duty, and to exhaust their strength in laborious efforts: or used to change their method, trying in turn first one plan then another—a course which involved a tedious waste of time and of energy.

3. Of students, who may master the sciences without difficulty, tedium, complaints, or blows, as if in sport and in merriment.

4. Of schools, which, when the method has been established, will be not only preserved continuously in full vigour, but increased without limit. For they will indeed become places of amusement, houses of delights and attractions, and since (on account of the infallibility of the method) each student, of whatever capacity, will become a doctor (of a higher or lower grade), it will never be possible for a dearth of suitable school-teachers to arise, or for learning not to flourish.

5. Of states, according to the testimony of Cicero. With whom agrees that of Diotogenes the Pythagorean (to be found in Stobæus). “For what is the foundation of the whole state? Surely, the development of the young. Since vines that have not been well cultivated will not bear good fruit.”