p07 Film Review

Education's Father

By John Taylor; 2008 May 08, 11 Jamal, 165 BE

I promised to review the 1983 production, "Jan Amos Comenius, (1592-1670) Father of Modern Education." Comenius is a Czech hero born not far from where my wife Marie comes from. The DVD's blurb says,

"Jan Comenius is among the most important leaders in all church history, particularly in the field of education, where he is known as the `Father of Modern Education.' This film dramatizes his life and his struggles to remain true to his faith, from his exile from Czechoslovakia to his tragedy-plagued travels through Europe."

I ordered this over the Internet since I figured, unlike a book, a movie is something that our whole family can share at once.

With a title as long as this DVD has, you know before you see it that this is not going to be another Amadeus, a feature film that was also made by a Czech director. Though parts of Comenius's life are dramatized, usually with voiceovers, there is enough narration to make it more a documentary than a filmed biography. It would be hard to depict such a fractured life in a continuous narrative anyway, I suppose. Comenius married three times, not out of choice as you expect now but because the icy hands of the Black Death and other illnesses snatched away Comenius's first two wives. They were all love matches, though, and quite charming.

As the title informs us, Comenius was born the year that Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and he lived through the thirty years war, a bloody religious struggle with such widespread destruction that one author I am reading compared the devastation to a nuclear war. Like Iraq right now, there was a popular insurrection crushed by an implacable foreign ruler. The king was a mid-reformation, mid-inquisition Catholic while most Bohemians, including Comenius and his church, had become Protestants.

This was not an age where disagreements about doctrine were merely a subject of heated debate. Point and counterpoint were made by the sword and the bullet. Armies and marauding bands went about wiping out entire towns and villages on the opposing side, leaving burning ruins and hanging body parts on poles as QED. The Catholic ruler, backed by the "holy" Roman Empire, won out in the end. Which is why the word "Bohemian" is still a byword for a rootless wanderer who clings to remnants of culture for dear life. You would not want to be a Moravian of that age either. They started out with over three million people; after losing a thirty year argument there remained less than a million inhabitants, with most banished or dead.

An interesting tactic that this Catholic Hapsburg prince used to depopulate an entire countryside was intentionally to print money, thus devaluing the currency into nothingness. That way the peasants could no longer purchase essentials and they starved all by themselves, without anybody laying a hand on anybody. Good thing nobody ever thought of that lately. Oh, wait, I forgot about post-WWI Germany and South America. And, oh yes, the currencies of the entire Third World for the past fifty years.

 Having gone through such horrible war and hatred, it would be strange if Comenius did not take it to heart. This makes his writings so relevant today. His spiritual crises in trying to grasp the senseless clash between those who kill in the name of a God of love drove him to only one conclusion: there is only way to end ignorance and war. We must come up with better, more efficient teaching. The same crisis of conscience afflicts our time, and the answer is still the same: a world curriculum.

 Unlike other early educational thinkers, including Plato and Rousseau, Comenius early in his career got actual, hands-on experience teaching school, from primary levels right on up. He saw that girls must be educated, if only because they are the first teachers of babies and toddlers. If you want boys well educated, then long-term the best way is to educate girls as well as possible. This was Comenius's innovation. Although he credits the Bible and Roman writers with the recognition that the early years are most important, as far as I know he was the first to draw the conclusion that girls must be taught first. In any case, Baha'is should discontinue giving our central Figures exclusive credit for this idea. It is unique only insofar as it given central sanction in a major religion, not in that nobody had ever thought of it before.

 Universality of education informed his thought from the beginning. He realized that education is universal by nature, and therefore that it must be compulsory and removed from the economic circumstances of the child's parents,

"Not the children of the rich or of the powerful only, but of all alike, boys and girls, both noble and ignoble, rich and poor, in all cities and towns, villages and hamlets, should be sent to school."

Later Comenius developed a philosophical synthesis that he called "pansophism." This was an attempt not only to embrace all knowledge, but to make that knowledge clear, teachable and easily passed on from one generation to the next. In modern evolutionary terms, any knowledge that cannot be made understandable to children from their earliest years is not worthwhile simply because it will not propagate into the future. Embarrassingly for the too subtle mind, anything that is not clear to all probably is misunderstood anyway. As Aeschylus put it, "The words of truth are simple," and the modern philosopher John Searle, "If you can't say it clearly, you don't understand it yourself."

The film does not emphasize the educational as much as the religious aspects of Comenius's thought; though it does show his character in early life taking his class to a blacksmith shop and demonstrating live the process of beating out a horseshoe. This gripped both my two kids. As we were watching I asked if they would like to have such a teacher, and both gave an enthusiastic "Yes!" In an age of digital animation, it is a testament to Comenius's understanding of teaching that he can touch them across so many centuries.

The film fits Comenius surprisingly well into the political currents of his age. After his church and people were exiled, Comenius set his hopes for saving them on Sweden. The Swedes hired him to set up their own educational system, but in the peace negotiations after their wars with the Hapsburgs, the King of Sweden basically threw the Moravians and Bohemians to the wolves. This was a great disappointment to Comenius, who by now was the sole bishop of his exiled church. I cannot help but wonder whether the present progress of Sweden and other Scandinavian countries may not be due in part to what Comenius did for their curriculum so many centuries ago.

A surprising and highly significant part of Comenius's life that comes out of the film and that I had not picked up from books and the Internet was his involvement at the end of his life in the peace negotiations to end the war between Holland and England. Both countries had helped him and respected this renowned scholar highly. It was a terrible anguish to him when they went to war. His courageous behavior, risking his life to travel to the peace conference, reminds one of Woodrow Wilson in Paris just after the First World War. I mean that analogy in a good and a bad way. I would love to get a hold of a copy of Comenius's speech -- it is really a harangue -- to a roomful of diplomats. Over and over he tells them: there is only one reason you went to war: naked greed. As I listened, part of me was saying, "Bravo, Comenius, if only we had someone like you to send to shout at the UN and to the plunderers of Iraq: truly, greed is still the only reason for war!" But another part of me is saying, "Please, Comenius, do not be so harsh! You will alienate them. You represent the learned, and the words of the learned must, in Baha'u'llah's words, be like milk, not like burning fire!" Anybody go goes near government on any level should study that speech for lessons on what to do, and what not to do.

I feel like putting a snippet of this great speech onto Youtube. For comparison put it next to a reading of Abdu'l-Baha's Tablet to The Hague. Another part of the film should go onto Youtube too, Comenius's allegory "The Labyrinth of the World," which is very nicely acted out in this production. If I get ambitious one day, I might do that. Meantime, let Comenius have the last word:

"The proper education of the young does not consist in stuffing their heads with a mass of words, sentences, and ideas dragged together out of various authors, but in opening up their understanding to the outer world, so that a living stream may flow from their own minds, just as leaves, flowers, and fruit spring from the bud on a tree."