# Comenius' School of Infancy/Chapter 4

CHAPTER IV.
CHARACTER OF EARLY INSTRUCTION.
1. Every one knows that whatever disposition the branches of an old tree possess, they must necessarily have been so formed from the first growth. The animal, unless it receive in its very first formation the foundations of all its members, no one expects that it would ever receive them, for who can amend that which was born lame, blind, defective, or deformed? Man, therefore, in the very first formation of body and soul, should be molded so as to be such as he ought to be throughout his whole life.
2. For although God can bring an inveterately bad man to be profitable by completely transforming him, yet in the regular course of nature it scarcely ever happens otherwise than that as a thing has begun to be formed from its origin, so it becomes completed and so it remains. Whatever seed any one has sown in his youth, such fruits he reaps in old age, according to the saying, “The pursuits of youth are the delights of age.”
3. Let not parents, therefore, devolve the whole instruction of their children upon teachers of schools and ministers of the church. It is impossible to make a tree straight that ​has grown crooked, or produce an orchard from a forest everywhere surrounded with briers and thorns. They ought themselves to know the methods of managing their children, according as they value them; to the end that, under their own hands, they may receive increases of wisdom and grace before God and man.
4. And inasmuch as every one ought to be competent to serve God and be useful to men, we maintain that he ought to be instructed in piety, in morals, and sound learning, and that parents should lay the foundations of these three in the very earliest age of their children. How far these need to be extended in the first six years must be severally shown.
5. Piety, true and salutary, consists in these three things: 1. That our hearts, having always and everywhere respect towards God, should seek Him in all that we do and say and think. 2. Having discovered the steps of Divine Providence, our hearts should follow God always with reverence, love, and obedience. 3. And thus always and every where mindful of God, conversing with God, our heart joining itself to God, it realizes peace, consolation, and joy.
6. This is true piety, bringing a man to a paradise of divine pleasure, the foundations of which may be so impressed upon a boy within the space of six years, as that he may know, (1) that there is a God; (2) who, being everywhere present, He beholds us all; (3) that He bestows abundantly, food, drink, clothing, and all things upon such as obey Him; (4) but punishes with death the stubborn and ​the immoral; therefore (5) that He ought to be feared, always to be invoked and loved as a father; and (6) that all things ought to be done which He commands; (7) and that, if we be good and righteous, He will take us to heaven. I maintain that an infant may be led on in these exercises until the sixth year of his age.
7. Children ought to be instructed in morals and virtue, especially in the following: 1. In temperance, that they may learn to eat and drink according to the wants of nature; not too greedily, or cram themselves with food and drink beyond what is sufficient. 2. In cleanliness and decorum, so that, as concerns food, dress, and care of the body, they may be accustomed to observe decency. 3. In respect towards superiors, whose actions, conversations, and instructions they should learn to revere. 4. In complaisance, so that they may be prompt to execute all things immediately at the nod and voice of their superiors. 5. It is especially necessary that they be accustomed to speak truth, so that all their words may be in accordance with the teaching of Christ, “that which is, is; that which is not, is not.” They should on no account be accustomed to utter falsehood, or to speak of anything otherwise than it really is, either seriously or in mirth. 6. They must likewise be trained to justice, so as not to touch, move stealthily, withdraw, or hide anything belonging to another, or to wrong another in any respect. 7. Benignity ought also to be instilled into them, and a love of pleasing others, so that they may be generous, and neither niggardly nor envious. 8. It is especially profitable for them to be accustomed to labor, as to acquire an aversion for indolence. 9. They should be taught not only to speak, but also to be silent ​when needful; for instance, during prayers, or while others are speaking. 10. They ought to be exercised in patience, so that they may not expect that all things should be done at their nod; from their earliest age they should gradually be taught to restrain their desires. 11. They should serve their elders with civility and readiness. This being an essential ornament of youth, they should be trained to it from their infancy. 12. From what has been said, courteousness will arise, by which they may learn to show good behavior to every one, to salute, to join hands, to bend the knee, to give thanks for little gifts, etc. 13. To avoid the appearance of rudeness or levity, let them at the same time learn gravity of deportment, so as to do all things modestly and gracefully. A child initiated in such virtues will easily, as occurred in the case of Christ, obtain for itself the favor of God and man.
8. As to sound learning, it admits of a threefold division; for we learn to know some things, to do some things, and to say some things; or rather, we learn to know, to do, and to say all things, except such as are bad.
9. A child in the first six years may begin to know, 1. Natural things, provided it knows the names of the elements, fire, air, water, and earth; and learn to name rain, snow, ice, lead, iron, etc. Likewise trees and some of the ​better known and more common plants, violets, grasses, and roses. Likewise, the difference between animals; what is a bird, what are cattle, what is a horse, etc. Finally, the outward members of its own body, how they ought to be named, for what use designed; as the ears for hearing, the feet for running, etc. 2. Of optics, it will suffice for children to know what is darkness, what is light, and the difference between the more common colors, and their names. 3. In astronomy, to discern between the sun, moon, and stars. 4. In geography, to know whether the place in which it was born and in which it lives be a village, a city, a town, or a citadel; what is a field, a mountain, a forest, a meadow, a river. 5. The child’s first instruction in chronology will be to know what is an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year; what is spring, summer, etc. 6. The beginning of history will be to remember what was done yesterday, what recently, what a year ago, what two or three years ago. 7. Household affairs, to distinguish who belongs to the family and who does not. 8. In politics, that there is in the state a chief ruler, ministers, and legislators, and that there are occasional assemblies of the nation.
10. As to actions, some have respect to the mind and the tongue, as dialectics, arithmetic, geometry, and music; some respect the mind and hand, such as labors and corporeal actions. 1. The principles of dialectics may be so far imbibed as that a child may know what is a question, and what an answer, and be able to reply distinctly to a question proposed, not talking about onions when the question is garlic. 2. Arithmetic, the foundation of which will be to know that something is much or little, be able to count to twenty, or even all the way to sixty, and understand what is an even and what an odd number; likewise that the number three is greater than two, and that three and one make four, etc. 3. In geometry, to know what is small or ​large, short or long, narrow or broad; thin or thick; likewise what is an inch, a foot, a yard, etc. 4. The child’s music will be to sing from memory some little verses from the Psalms or hymns. 5. As to the mind and hand, the beginning of every labor or work of art is to cut, to split, to carve, to arrange, to tie, to untie, to roll up, and to unroll, such things as are familiar to all children.
11. As to language, propriety is obtained by grammar, rhetoric, and poetry. 1. The grammar of the first six years in question will be that the child should be able to express in his own language so much as it knows of things, even though it speak imperfectly; yet let it be to the point, and so articulated as that it may be understood. 2. Their rhetoric will be to use natural actions, and, in case they hear, to understand and repeat a trope or a figure. 3. Their rudiments in poetry will be to commit to memory certain verses or rhymes.
12. Care must be taken as to the method adopted with children in these things, not apportioning the instruction precisely to certain years or months (as will afterwards be done in the other schools), but in general only, for the following reasons: 1. Because all parents cannot observe such order in their homes as prevails in public schools, where no unusual matters disturb the regular course of things. 2. Because in this early age all children are not endowed ​with equal ability, some beginning to speak in the first year, some in the second, and some in the third.
13. I will therefore show, in a general way, how children should be instructed during the first six years: (1) in a knowledge of things; (2) in labors with activity; (3) in speech; (4) in morals and virtues; (5) in piety; (6) inasmuch as life and sound health constitute the basis of all things in relation to men, it will be shown how, by diligence and care of parents, children may be preserved sound and healthy.
{{dhr|0.5em]]
COLLATERAL READING.
Edgeworth’s Practical Education, Chap. XX.; Laurie’s Primary Instruction in Relation to Education, Chap. I.; Preyer’s Mental Development in the Child, Chap. I.; Richter’s Levana, Second Fragment, Chaps. I., II., and III.
* ↑ Compare with the first book of Rousseau’s Émile (Boston, 1885). Plato also says in the Republic: “In every work the beginning is the most important part, especially in dealing with anything young and tender; for that is the time when any impression, which one may desire to communicate, is most readily stamped and taken.”
* ↑ Fröbel, in his Education of Man (New York, 1887), says: “It is highly important for man’s present and later life that at this stage he absorbs nothing morbid, low, mean. . . . For, alas! often the whole life of man is not sufficient to efface what he has absorbed in childhood, the impressions of early youth, simply because his whole being, like a large eye, was open to them and wholly given up to them.”
* ↑ In the Great Didactic Comenius says: “Justice will be learned by doing harm to no one, by giving to each his own, by avoiding lying and deceit, by being generally serviceable and amiable.”
* ↑ Joseph Neef, the first to introduce Pestalozzian ideas in America, in his Plan and Method of Education says: “To unfold any faculty whatever, we must exercise it, and to exercise it we must possess means for exercising it; and these means we have in abundance. Let us but open our eyes. The whole cabinet of nature, beings and objects, animate and inanimate, obtrude themselves on us, and yet how neglected they are.”Professor Preyer, of Germany, remarks: “The extraordinary incitement which the direct observation of nature, and particularly of animate nature, gives during the whole season of childhood, nothing else can supply or make good.”
* ↑ Comenius was one of the first to recognize the educational value of manual training. “Learn to do by doing,” was one of his cardinal maxims. Locke and Rousseau accepted this maxim. The former wrote: “I cannot forbear to say, I would have my gentleman learn a trade, a manual trade.”
* ↑ Ascham quaintly remarks in the Schoolmaster (London, 1864): But if the childe miss, either in forgetting a worde or in changing a good with a worse or in misordering a sentence, I would not have the master either frowne or chide with him, if the childe have done his diligence and used no frowardship therein.”
* ↑ The student of education, familiar with the writings of Comenius, is constantly surprised at his familiarity with child-mind,—a familiarity not common among educational philosophers in our own day. How much more remarkable it must have been two and a half centuries ago!
* ↑ [[Author:Aristotle}} had previously declared: “The first care should be given to the body rather than to the mind.”