Reforming Schools
Chapter 22 of Panorthosia
By John Taylor; 2009 Aug 16, Kamal 16, 166 BE
In Panorthosia or Universal Reform, John Amos Comenius proposed that we institute a democratic world government consisting of three pillars, each elected independently and work separately but harmonious in spirit and aim. The three are a political senate, a department of science and education and a parliament of religions. The 16th chapter describes the second of these, a combined research institute and department of education that he called the "College of Light." I discussed this chapter recently ("The College and Factories of Light, 29 July, 2009 http://badiblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/college-of-light.html).
Today I want to go over the more specific proposals he makes for improving schools in the 22nd chapter of Panorthosia, "The Particular Reform of Schools." Unlike the College of Light, which is devoted to the general question of how to educate the entire human race, this chapter concentrates on specific reforms that would make schools more effective not only in teaching the next generation but also in laying the groundwork for further reform.
Every specific proposal in this chapter is part of a set of standards similar to what we now call quality control. Quality control standards are common in industry but for various reasons they have been resisted in education. This lack persists today mostly because we have no world language, nor is there a single world government to devise universal standards or to oversee their implementation. Worse, there no common vision among educators as to what schools should seek to accomplish.
As he does for other institutions, including families and neighbourhoods, Comenius suggests a combined mission statement and reward that I have been calling an escutcheon. If it succeeds in institution these reforms and maintains a high standard a school would earn the right to post this escutcheon above its front door. As elsewhere in Panorthosia, Comenius states the motto and declaration for his proposed escutcheon in the last paragraph of the chapter.
"Every school that is reformed in this way will deserve to be honoured with the following inscription over its door: HERE IS THE DWELLING-PLACE OF LIGHT AND THE DELIGHTS OF HEAVENLY WISDOM among the sons of men, and we shall live to see the day when the noble and the humble, the highest and the lowest alike, will have feelings of shame and sorrow that they did not attend here to receive their training for life." (Ch. 22, para 33, p. 54)
I think the spirit of this declaration is that with a world educational authority any school would have an equal chance at entering the first rank of educational institutions. Today only the best endowed schools in the richest countries get a shot at this honour. Under a Comenian world government, a village school in China, India or Africa would have the same opportunity to compete with the wealthiest private finishing school. As long as a school strives to uphold these standards it would earn the right to post the above declaration above its front door as a mark of excellence.
For the rest of today's discussion I will look at the general aim of schools that Comenius envisions, and leave the specific reforms to a future date.
Comenius begins this chapter by stipulating that learning is not an end in itself and that multiplying the number of schools is not the same as spreading education. The chief purpose of schools should be to bolster human happiness. "I maintain that we have multiplied schools and studies and selfish scheming for advancement, but we have not yet added to the true joys of life." (Ch. 22, para 1, p. 38) To my mind, the divorce he perceived between joy and learning in schooling explains why today our lives are dissipated by an obsession with idle pastimes and recreation.
Even as we face some of the gravest crises ever, we persist in devoting our lives to sports, gambling, cinema and computer gaming, pleasures that are designed to have as little as possible to do with the high ideals of education. As Comenius puts it, educators "have not yet added to the true joys of life." Just as medicine in its primitive stages imagined that the more bitter the medicine the more likely the cure, so educational theory held (and to some extent still does) that the more violent, forced, theoretical and unpleasant the studies, the more educational they are. Education concentrates mainly on intellectual prowess and ignores the fear expressed by Seneca that, "Many of those who come out well-educated cease to be good." (quoted in Ch. 22, para 1, p. 38) When we cease to take our main joy from goodness, the only pleasure left is blind pursuit of money.
"For what is this modern education which (more) schools are going to multiply? At the highest level it produces philosophers, doctors, lawyers, and politicians, that is, inhabitants of the world, who admire and administer its vanities. But it also produces theologians, you may say. My answer is that this, too, has now become a money-making career and a contract for worldly vanity." (Comenius, Panorthosia, Ch. 22, para 1, p. 38)
This is the observation of an educational genius of the first order, and if anything it applies more now than in Comenius's day. It is not so much commercialism and the capitalist system that fills our best trained minds with greed, it is an educational system that divorces practice from theory, that itself worships money and selects its students for their ability to gain high marks while ignoring how they apply virtue, ethics and ideas in actual service.
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