Page:The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius (1896).pdf/148

 reputation. Yf it be Upaland, whaire the people convene to doctrine but once in the weeke, then must either the reidar or the minister take cayre over the children and youth of the Parische, to instruct them in their first rudiments. “This must be carefully provideit, that no fader, of what estait or condition that ever he be, use his children at his awin fantasie, especiallie in thair youth-heade; but all must be compelled to bring up their children in learnyng and virtue.” In addition to these elementary schools, a secondary school was to be established “in everie notable toun,” while the three Universities of St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen completed the system. To smaller details, such as subjects of instruction or class-divisions, Knox did not condescend; but the deficiency is supplied by George Buchanan in his scheme for the “College of Humanite,” to be attached to the University of St. Andrews. In this scheme, written before 1567, Buchanan gives us a curriculum which is purely humanist and literary, and which was possibly modelled on Calvin’s school at Geneva.

The school is divided into six classes, divided in turn into decuriones, each in charge of a nomenclator. In the lowest class the boys begin to read and write Latin through the medium of Terence. “In thys classe thay salbe constraint to speik Latin; and dayly to compone sum smal thyng eftyr thair capacite.”

In the fifth and fourth classes they shall read Terence, Cicero, and Ovid. The third class commences Greek grammar, and the study of prosody. It also attacks Linacre’s Latin Grammar.

In the second and first classes Cicero’s Rhetoric and Orations, as well as the works of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Homer, are read. The boys are to be exercised every month in verse, oration, and declamation.

At the end of the year, in August, a kind of examination,