By Federico Mayor (Paris)
“Just as the whole world is a school for the whole of the human race, from the beginning of time until the very end, so the whole of his life is a school for every man, from the cradle to the grave. It is no longer enough to say with Seneca: ‘No age is too late to begin learning’, we must say: ‘Every age is destined for learning, nor is man given other goals in learning than in life itself.’ Nay, not even death itself, or the world, brings man’s life to an end. Everyone who is born a man must pass beyond all these things right into eternity, as if to a celestial university. Therefore all that precedes is the way, the preparation, the workshop, the lower school.”
This extraordinary passage from the chapter on Universal schools in the Pampaedia highlights the unique scope and force of Comenius’s philosophy—or, more precisely, his metaphysics—of education. In 1956, on the occasion of the third centenary of the publication of the Opera Didactica Omnia, the Member States of UNESCO associated themselves with the world-wide homage to ‘one of the first men to propagate the ideas which UNESCO took for its guidance at the time of its establishment’. Today, in keeping with a new resolution adopted by the UNESCO General Conference, I am happy to be present at this conference to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the birth of John Amos Comenius and to share some thoughts with you on the heritage of this visionary thinker and its relevance to the mission of UNESCO on the eve of a new millennium.
By a strange coincidence, the name of Comenius itself announces a filiation with UNESCO. Has it been noted before, I wonder, that Comenius is an anagram of ‘I’m UNESCO?’ Whatever the case, it has become increasingly clear that the ideas that inform and shape the thought of Comenius make him an important precursor of educational philosophy and practice in our own time and particularly of an international organisation like UNESCO dedicated to the world-wide promotion of education in furtherance of human welfare, understanding and peace.
The first and most striking quality of Comenius is perhaps his radical utopianism, his unshakeable commitment to moving from where we happen to be the where reason and the creative engagement of our mind and energies could lead us. This commitment is encapsulated in that most evocative of titles: The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, in which he summed up his early experience of the confrontation of reality and dream. In a Europe riven by dissension and violence, he was to have long and bitter experience of the labyrinths of this world‑moving throughout Europe, an exile from his native Moravia, and finding peace possibly only at the end of his life in his adoptive city of Amsterdam. Yet in all this time, he never ceased to believe that the paradise of the heart was the supreme reality and to proclaim and argue his conviction in a series of works of astonishing range that were to make him one of the maîtres à penser of seventeenth‑century Europe.
Today more than ever we need the imaginative and visionary capacity of Comenius. Of course, it is scarcely possible from our present vantage point—which has seen among other things the virtual eclipse of totalitarian ideology in Europe—to found an Utopia on a metaphysician’s dream of total knowledge any more than it is to base it on the certainties of the technocrat. Today’s Utopia or Utopias must reflect a world we know to be one of variety and indeterminacy, it must reflect a society of movement and change—one too often unaware of the intolerable conditions in which a large part of humanity lives and one where a personal commitment to redress such social asymmetries is too often lacking (particularly among the most affluent), it must reflect the instability inherent in creative free will that daily reshapes our perceptions and modifies our convictions. This, and not the controlled dialectics of the philosopher, is the reality with which we must attune ourselves intellectually, morally and aesthetically if we are to reconcile ourselves with the foundations of our own being in nature and the universe. Yet the spirit of Comenius, his uncompromising idealism, is more than ever necessary in the complex world in which we live in order to further the principles of justice, democracy, tolerance, understanding and peace so essential to human survival and development.
Education is at the very heart of the legacy of Comenius, just as it was at the centre of his life. However, his educational ideas derive their cogency and vitality from the vast philosophical framework in which they are set, from their ‘pansophic’ context. For Comenius, human thought is conceived as participating in the formative and creative mechanisms of nature itself, as being a part of natura naturans. Education, in this view, is an integral part of the formative process to which all beings are subject and is thus the key to their individual and collective fulfilment. The precepts that Comenius derived from this fundamental insight—with his genius for the long sighted application of his ideas—are today part of the mainstream of educational thinking and as such inform UNESCO’s programme of co‑operation with its Member States.
One of the priorities that UNESCO—together with the World Bank, UNDP and UNICEF—is pursuing at the present time is to eradicate the blight of illiteracy currently affecting over a billion people world-wide (two thirds of them women and girls) and to ensure the effective provision of education for all as a condition of individual and social development. The philosophy that inspires its efforts has as one of its essential tributaries the ideas of Comenius who, in the early 17th century, recognised the importance of literacy (‘First of all it is essential that all persons learn to read and write’), advocated universal education for boys and girls alike (‘All young people of both sexes should be sent to public schools’) and defended the principle of equal access to instruction without distinction of creed, class or indeed ability (‘No-one should be excluded, even less prevented, from pursuing wisdom and cultivating the mind’).
In another area on which UNESCO is focussing its attention, the quality of education, Comenius was astonishingly far‑seeing. A whole series of pedagogic insights based on his perception of education as a natural formative process—his advocacy of a teaching methodology geared to different stages of learning, his stress on pupil motivation and learning by encouragement rather than under duress, this emphasis on practical work and informal education, his conviction that example should precede rule, his awareness of the importance of play in the learning process—mark him out as a pioneer in the field and go some way towards justifying Michelet’s description of him as the ‘Galileo of education’.
In an age when education hat neither stable institutions nor general programme of study, Comenius was concerned to establish rational administrative structures and graduated, coherent programs. At the same time, he had a keen sense of the need for interconnections between subjects. His books on language teaching, such as the Gate of Languages Unlocked (Janua linguarum reserata), argue the need for the integration of language study with other studies. He was also an advocate of an interdisciplinary approach to science teaching: ‘The teaching of the sciences is bad when it is fragmentary and gives no general outline of the programme of study, no-one can be perfectly instructed in a particular science until he has some idea of the other sciences’. In all these respects, the thinking of Comenius is strikingly modern and foreshadows the efforts of organisations like UNESCO to promote the best modern educational practice among its Member States.
Perhaps the most striking parallels between the ideas of Comenius and the educational aims of UNESCO are to be found in the wider philosophy that underlines his specific prescriptions in this domain. His early articulation of a philosophy of lifelong education rooted in the notion of human society as an educative society, the essential connection he makes between education and the promotion of peace, and his strong sense of the active social function of education—all these emphases find a strong echo in UNESCO’s current educational programme.
As adviser to a succession of governments in his time and as a writer who invariably pursued a didactic purpose even in the most philosophical of his writings, Comenius systematically sought to give an active dimension to his own educational activities. This concern to translate thought into action is doubtless at the origin of one of his most extraordinary anticipations—his proposal for a world assembly in which all the nations would be represented and for a College of Light whose scholars members would seek to ‘extend the domition of the human mind over things and promote the light of wisdom among all nations and minds, always for the higher and better’. This proposal, continued in the Panorthosia or Universal Reform, marks out Comenius as one of the spiritual ancestors of international co‑operation and—in almost uncanny fashion—of UNESCO.
Naturally, one should not press too far the parallels between the thought of Comenius and ideas in our own time. He was after all operating within a metaphysical and millenarian tradition in many ways remote from our own and on an empirical basis that was entirely inadequate from a scientific perspective. His anti‑Copernican stance and the Platonic elitism so evident in his prescription for the College of Light are revealing in this respect. The wonder is that, within such a framework of thought, he should have been able to develop intuitions of such enduring significance three and half centuries later.
How then at the approach of the 21st century does the Organisation anticipated in so many ways by Comenius propose to develop his legacy and that of all the other thinkers who have helped to shape our present‑day conceptions of education? At UNESCO’s last General Conference, its Member States agreed that, twenty years after the Faure Commission produced its seminal report Learning To Be, an International Commission should be set up to reflect on education and learning for the 21st century. Without wishing in any way to pre‑empt the work of the Commission, I thing it would be safe to anticipate that many of the themes central to the thinking of Comenius will find their way on to the Commission’s agenda. Expanding the vision of education for all, educating for human development, ensuring the quality and relevance of education to respond to social demand, exploring new learning methods, developing early childhood education—these are just some of the probable themes that Comenius would have recognised as germane to his own concerns.
Perhaps the strongest link between the thinking of Comenius and the educational agenda for the 21st century will be the emphasis placed on global or international education. For who can doubt that, beyond the often disconcerting ebb and flow of local political changes, the fundamental movement of our time is towards globality, towards a world whose parts are more and more organically interrelated. This movement—linked among other things to the fabulous developments in transportation and communications in this century—is powerfully reinforced by the growing consciousness of common environmental problems that could threaten our survival as a species. Global education, revised to take account of new political realities, will be of increasing importance in the curriculum of the 21st century both in order to foster international awareness and at the same time to promote and protect the world's irreplaceable heritage of cultural identities and values in the face of reductive and standardising trends. Comenius, simultaneously world citizen and defender of his national language and culture, can serve here once again as a guide by pointing the way to a necessary synthesis.
In the new global education curriculum, environmental questions—including the essential issue of sustainable development—will clearly have to be given prominence commensurate with its vital importance for the future of the planet. Similarly, education for human rights, democracy and multicultural living will have an important place in the new curriculum. Respect for human rights—recognition of the right of all to life, liberty and security (including protection from environmental hazards)—are fundamental to a global awareness. It is moreover clearer than ever today that democracy is crucial to the observance of human rights, just as it is essential to the full realisation of individual and social potential. Furthermore, only democracy can provide the framework within which minority cultures can find expression, intercultural dialogue can effectively take place and tolerance—conceived not merely as an attitude of mind but as a disposition of the sensibility—can flourish. Following the International Forum on Culture and Democracy held in Prague last September, UNESCO is to organise a conference in Tunis next November to examine what should be the specific content of an affective education for democracy. Comenius—who said of the Universal School that it should be conceived in ‘the image of civic life, where all will learn to be governed and to govern in their turn, as in some miniature State, thus learning from childhood to govern things, themselves and others (‘if fate should lay upon them the necessity of ruling others’)—would surely have approved the inclusion in the syllabus of such a ‘preparation for democratic life’.
J. A. Komenský a Slovenská kultúra, Bratislava 1993, pp. 6-10
Comenius in Deutschland
Hans-Georg Herrlitz, Göttingen
Wenn es darum geht, die „Klassiker der Pädagogik“ aufzuzählen, ist der große Jan Amos Comenius immer dabei. Fritz Blättner, Herwig Blankertz und Albert Reble haben ihm in ihren weitverbreiteten „Geschichten der Pädagogik“ ebenso ein eigenes Kapitel gewidmet wie Franz Hofmann in der DDR-offiziösen Geschichte der Erziehung, ein frühes Beispiel partieller gesamtdeutscher Übereinstimmung. Dass der Orbis pictus und die Didactica magna des Comenius an unseren Universitäten zum prüfungsrelevanten LehrbuchwIssen gehören, wird wohl kaum zu bezweifeln sein. Aber ist damit bereits ein hinreichender Lebendigkeitsnachweis erbracht?
Befragen wir doch einmal die Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, das führende Organ der deutschen Erziehungswissenschaft. In ihrem 20. Beiheft hat Heinz-Elmar Tenorth 1986 eine Analyse der Jahrgänge 1955-1979 vorgelegt und dabei eine Auflistung der jeweils sieben meist zitierten Klassiker zusammengestellt. Der Spitzenreiter ist mit weitem Abstand Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), gefolgt von Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) und Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).
Und wo bleibt Comenius? Er taucht in dieser Hitliste nur ein einziges Mal auf: 1964 auf Platz 5, gemeinsam mit Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) und Helmut Schelsky (1912-1984), und dieses enttäuschende Bild wird keineswegs erfreulicher, wenn man die Autorenregister bis zum Jahrgang 1997 weiterverfolgt. Die Zitathäufigkeit schwankt um drei- bis viermal jährlich und kletterte nur im Jubiläumsjahr 1992, anlässlich seines 400. Geburtstages, auf den Spitzenwert von 19 Nennungen.
Angesichts solcher Befunde werde ich den Verdacht nicht los, dass wir den großen Jan Amos in Deutschland zwar gelegentlich feiern, ihn aber leider kaum noch lesen, dass wir seine Bedeutung preisen, aber seine Texte nicht mehr verarbeiten, dass er uns also in diesen unfrommen Zeiten gänzlich fremd geworden ist. Mit Wilhelm von Humboldts bildungstheoretischen Waffen mag sich auch heute noch manche pädagogische Auseinandersetzung bestreiten und vielleicht sogar gewinnen lassen. Aber mit Comenius? Ich fürchte, er ist in der Reservatenkammer unserer Comenius-Gelehrten verschwunden, denen wir Respekt und Dankbarkeit dafür schulden, dass sie sich nicht entmutigen lassen, uns immer wieder an den großen Alten zu erinnern. Aber werden wir uns damit abfinden müssen?
Aus: Comenius-Jahrbuch, Bd. 7, Baltmannsweiler (Schneider-Verlag Hohengehren) 1999, S. 100.