Comenius 1592 – 1670

Jan Amos Komensky, known in Latin as Comenius, was a Czech bishop of the Unity of the Brethren, philosopher, theologian, and the principal architect of modern educational thought. Driven into exile by the Thirty Years' War, he spent decades wandering across central and northern Europe, advising princes and reformers from Poland to England, Sweden, and the Netherlands. His Great Didactic, Orbis Pictus, the first illustrated textbook for children, and the Pansophical project for the unification of all knowledge defended the education of all human beings, women as well as men, in a peace-loving Christian society. He has been called the father of modern education.

Jan Amos Komenský, known in Latin as Comenius, was born in Moravia in March 1592, very probably at Nivnice. Orphaned young, he was educated by the Unity of the Brethren and completed his studies at the Calvinist academies of Herborn and Heidelberg before returning to teach at Přerov and serve as pastor at Fulnek. The Battle of the White Mountain in 1620 and the ensuing Counter-Reformation drove the Brethren into exile; Comenius lost his library and his first wife and child to plague, and from 1628 led the displaced community from Leszno in Polish Greater Poland, where he was elected bishop in 1632. Later years took him to England (1641), Sweden, Hungary, and finally Amsterdam.

His works include the Czech allegory The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart (1623); the Latin manuals Janua Linguarum Reserata (1631) and Orbis Sensualium Pictus (1658), the first illustrated school textbook for children; the Didactica Magna (Czech 1632, Latin 1657); the vast pansophic project De Rerum Humanarum Emendatione Consultatio Catholica, recovered only in 1934; and a stream of irenic, theological, and educational writings.

Comenius held that all human beings, of every class, sex, and nation, ought to be taught all things needful by a graded method moving from the senses to abstract knowledge, in the mother tongue first and across a lifetime, in the service of universal reform and Christian peace. His pansophic vision and graded curriculum earned him the epithet 'father of modern education'. He died in Amsterdam in November 1670 and is buried at Naarden.