The Life of a Philosopher: John Amos Comenius (Jan Amos Komensky)

The philosopher chosen for this research paper is John Amos Comenius, also known as Jan Amos Komensky. He was born in Nivnice, Moravia now known as the Czech Republic on March 28, 1592 and died November 15, 1670 in Naarden, Holland. He became a Morivian minister and dedicated his life to educating and writing books. John Amos Comenius was a philosopher who had his own ideas about education, how they came about, and how they influenced early childhood.

When Comenius was twelve years old his parent's died and was left an orphan. Since he was an orphan, his schooling started at a later age. He went to the Latin school at Prerau. During the time he was going to school at the age of sixteen, he was able to discern the inadequacies of the school, "As one of his biographers remarks: The defects of this early education were the seeds from which sprang the whole of his didactic efforts. Considerably older than his schoolfellows, he was able to criticise the methods and speedily arrive at the conclusion that the lack of progress was due more to the inefficiency of the teachers than to the idleness of their pupils" (Monroe, 1971:41). The experience served as an avenue for Comenius to begin thinking about making teaching better for the teachers as well as for the students. As the biographers continue to say, "From this time onward, he began to devise new methods of class instruction and better schemes of study. From the vivid memory of the horrors through which he had passed, of the thousand and one rules that had to be learned by rote before they were understood, of the monotonous study of grammar, only diversified by the maddening effort to translate Latin authors without the assistance of suitable dictionaries or commentaries, s...

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...tarts out slowly by teaching the ABC's with pictures of the letter and a picture that starts with the same letter, she does these activities everyday.

In conclusion, John Amos Cormenius was a philosopher that dedicated his life to the education of children as well as to anyone that wanted to learn. Cormenius had ideas that changed the way children should learn, he gave different views on how children learn, and his work is still used today.

Work Cited

The Whole Art of Teaching (2002) Retrieved October 3, 2003, from website

http://www.froebelweb.org/web7005.html.

Monroe, Will S. (1971) Comenius and the Beginnings of Educational Reform,

New York: Arno Press

Morrison, George S. (2004) The Past and the Present: Prologue to the Future, Early Childhood Education (pp.83-84), New Jersey: Pearson.